Please help

As you have noticed, my blogging has dropped off lately. Here's why:

I cannot seem to log in or have normal access to googleWhen I try to sign in to anything google – google groups, google blogger etc. I get a “page cannot be displayed” error in I.E.6 and I get a “The connection was refused when attempting to contact http://www.google.com”/ error when using FireFoxI cannot connect to main google page at all in I.E. 6 unless I have tools>options>connections>LAN settings>auto detect settings enabled.Recently had a virus issue that took a lot to recover from and installed AVG 7.5 which was the only program that was able to get rid of the virus. I thought it was a firewall thing so I disabled it AVG but that didn’t make a difference. I even went into windows safe mode with connections and I still could not access google.What on earth am I doing wrong? I have run Adaware and deleted all threats. I have specifically made google.com and google.ca allowed sites in I.E. 6 with no effect. Are there any suggestions? Can anyone help me? (see this discussion on tech support forum)