took a while to find out why win7 was suddenly telling me that it had no internet connection, when it did.
the fault of the false message was traced to the new sandbox feature.
it was enabled by default and caused win7 to be unable to detect the internet connection.
the internet connection was fine.
it’s just win7 couldn’t tell.
so the sandbox feature of avast 7 is now disabled and everything is back to normal.
.