I have had a Norton personal firewall as part of a Norton Internet Security package for nearly a year with no problems.

Suddenly now I can't access anything on the inernet without switching the firewall off (and I mean literally nothing).

The only thing I have done which might even have the slightest connection with this is download a firefox update.

I don't want a load of criticism of Norton, I want some practical advice as to what may have caused this and what I might be able to do about it to get it back working as it was.

I had a similar problem two years ago with Nortons Internet Security, it carried out an automated update as usual, restarted the pc and after that I could not access the internet and as you say disabling it gives you access, the only way around I found was to uninstall nortons and re-install it, then install the updates and it worked fine, then I checked it was working on www.grc.com. It did this on two occasions mostly after some update had been applied, to be honest I had nothing but trouble with Nortons.

I've also tried McAfee and found it to be no better than Nortons if not worse to some extent, the best that I've found are running a combination of Zone Alarm and AVG, not had any problems.

I was pretty much thinking I'd have to do that.

I've never had the slightest problem with it before though, so I'm quite keen to get it working right again.