system
3
This thread sounds great. Oh I never rush into a reformat. It’s just rare that I run into a difficult obstacle and I don’t have the patience I did in my younger years.
Good suggestion, but no luck. Current settings:
Connected via dialup @ 40Kbps (that time) through a local provider.
Proxomitron and ZoneAlarm are both turned off. IE6 is set to not use any proxy. Net connection showed a light on a connect attempt to Google, but returned a 404 error.
Browser then closed, and opened Outlook Express. Verified that mail settings are the same as the working settings from several days back. Attempted to connect to my mail server and got the mail equivalent of a 404 error. No Socket Found.
One thing I remembered may also affect all this. About a week ago AVG cleaned off the Internet Optimizer virus except for the restore sector. I turned that off also and AdAware found its entries in the registry, so the virus is gone, but I don’t know what it may have done to my connection settings somewhere obscure. That’s why I looked up Avast in the first place. 
And at the moment Avast is still uninstalled, with AVG serving as my virus protection.