system
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Thanx Asyn for your help. Problem is solved! Turns out that connection issue was due to Windows Firewall. Had been trying a couple of different firewalls and went back to built-in WFW. Somehow there were now extra rules in there which were messing things up. Reset to default and now all is good. Only one question remains - Does Avast give any kind of warning if definitions update fail? If not, this would be feature recommendation so as not to wait a week until Windows notifies a problem.