Windows Vista Vista w/Firefox and Bittorrent no longer work.

Help; Something happened recently (a Vista update?) and all kinds of weird things started happening: First Firefox can't download any pages. It says to "check network settings "; I haven't changed any network settings. Internet Explorer works fine. I checked to make sure Firefox was allowed through Windows Firewall, deleted and reinstalled it in the firewall, still didn't fix it. Also at the same time my Bittorrent stopped working and my Norton Corporate Antivirus shows that it is turned off, but it won't turn on and it will no longer update.
I did system restore to point before this all happened, but still didn't fix these problems.
I'm not very computer literate; Is this a problem with an update or is this Malware; It seems to be some sort of connectivity issue/security system.
Does anybody know what this is??

 

I had some similar problems. one of the causes was a change of drive letter assignment. If you have multiple drives and partitions, one or more of them may be assigned to a different letter. This may be caused by a number of things. here's a few things you can do to rectify. One could try to reassign the drive letters, but I prefer to leave that alone. instead:

In Firefox: go to tools>options>main and check the default download folder, even if you use [ask me where to save files].

Same with bit torrent (depending on your client): preferences>directories check your default folders to make sure they are valid.

You can undo restore as it won't reassigned the drive letters.

Hope this helps.

You may also have to change some of your shortcuts.