Weirdest problem in Firefox

[AirForceElite]

exactly 2 days ago, everything was working fine and i never experienced this.
so anyways...i leave the comp for 1 hour, come back, and EVERY website in firefox shows as "unable to connect" (a.k.a. error 404 in IE)

Unable to connect

Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at mail.google.com.

* The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few
moments.

* If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network
connection.

* If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure
that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

now the weird part, every other internet aspect works.

aim works
msn works
IE itself wors
gmail works...you name it, it works.

except for firefox...which still shows server not found.

i have tried the following:

-shut down comp
-take power off modem
-take power off modem for more than 15 minutes
-uninstalled firefox
-uninstalled any addons/themes
-deleted registry files

i seriously have no idea what is going on.
reformat is one way...but i can't reformat yet due to not having enough time to install updates/drivers/game patches/etc....

i havent installed any software that would cause this.
and dont forget that, even if i installed such software that interffered with FF, then why did it only "interfere" when i was away...meaning if it was supposed to make FF buggy, why didnt it make it buggy from the begining....

P.S. the *ONLY* thing that happaned that day previous to that, is me downloading a movie torrent (i am talking about video game movie btw, so nothing illegal)....it had sopmewhat like 200 seeders and 600 leechers, so you would assume that it would download at least little bit...but no, that torrent never downloaded a single KB...it was some strange torrent because i never saw a torrent not work when it has so many seeders

 

[Slammy1]

Hmm... Far be it from companies to post malicious code to try and stop piracy, or even put anti piracy measures on purchased media. Often files get trapped on PCs by people not knowing how to reboot in safe mode to delete the offensive file creating a large number of apparent seeders. Not that I would know of such things, just guessing...

EDIT: Sorry, forgot my point. I've been having Firefox problems since their last update. Started getting intrusion alerts also, hmmm...

 

[Jiggz]

I have experienced this before and it came out that by starting Internet Explorer and making sure it connects to the Internet will also make Firefox work again.

 

[AirForceElite]

Originally posted by: Jiggz
I have experienced this before and it came out that by starting Internet Explorer and making sure it connects to the Internet will also make Firefox work again.

i am posting this using IE