Greetings to you, my friends in The Basement!

I am having a terrible, annoying problem with my internet connection. As you can see, it's working perfectly fine for me here, but not in some places. Recently, I acquired some sort of fast-acting virus (from I know not where) that suddenly popped up one day and began performing a false "virus scan" on my desk top. Thankfully I was alert and caught it before it finished, but the computer was awfully sluggish after A.V.G. had deleted the offending virus. Restarting my computer, all was right when I signed back on, and the computer was working at tip-top speed!

A few days passed, and I thought I had gotten away from whatever ill effects the virus might have intended. After getting over my pleasant surprise at the lack of side-effects, I went to Photobucket to upload a painting. Usually, that website takes a few moments to go from 0% -> 15% -> 29% etc. until it reaches 100%, and the image is uploaded. That time, however, and every time I have tried since, the image tries to upload, but suddenly jumps from 0% to 100%! When it "finishes", the image has not been uploaded, and this error message appears:



You may ask "how did you get that image up on T.W.C., if Photobucket isn't working?", and I should answer that Imageshack works perfectly, allowing me to upload images. When I realised that fact, I was consoled about Photobucket and decided to use Imageshack instead. "No great loss", I thought!

All seemed settled, but then... I tried to use Google Earth, the interactive map program, to look something up. Lo' and behold: Google Earth tells me it cannot connect to EarthNet, the server which supplies information to the Google Earth program. When I do use the program, the map simply doesn't load after the initial start-up, and it remains blurry as I focus in.

These things perplex me, as my Firewall settings are the same as before the virus attacked; neither, still, does the Firewall seem to be blocking Google Earth! It seems that my internet connection on the whole is working fine, as I can obviously use T.W.C. and have been doing so for several weeks. I didn't report this problem earlier as it didn't inconvenience me, but I've just realised now that Internet Explorer does not work, whereas it did before the virus came. Firefox is just fine... It seems only specific programs which use this "network connection" are screwing up, but I am totally in the dark about such things.

Please excuse my ignorance on the subject, but I merely use computers; I do not know them well. Is there any advice or starting point I can begin with?