Thanks for the reply, but that is where I started, “…I tried experimenting with the firewall, and all the shields…” From there I moved on to diagnostics on the adapter, then resetting the windows components, such as winsock, etc…
Even when Avast was ‘disabled’ from the user interface, my system still wasn’t interacting with the network. I had to stop it from loading to resolve my network issues. Even then uninstall was not enough and I had to use the ‘cleaner’.
Avast is still running on three of the machines in my LAN, two with XP (wired) and one with Vista (wireless), they have zero issues and run just like they always have.
It does sound like a firewall issue, but I could not make it work w/the firewall disabled from the interface… :o