FIXED

Fact: Problem was NOT the firewall

How I fixed it:
I followed some german guy’s suggestion in another thread, related to the registry entries for windows temp folder…I had mine setup as:

TEMP: %WINDIR%\Temp
TMP: %WINDIR%\tmp

His post was actually mentioning that the windows’ temp folders should be set to:

%SystemDir%\Temp
%SystemDir%\tmp

I tried that, rebooted… bingo works! I thought it couldn’T be that stupid… so I set them back to what they were before, rebooted… no more HTTP connections working!

Got them back to proposed entries, working…

Sooooooooooooo, looks like AVAST was having a hard time with my default windows settings, that is strange since %WINDIR%\Temp and \tmp were both valid as far as my stsem goes…

No idea why all of a sudden it became an issue…

Cheers.