Problems accessing certain Sites

Clarification questions: Are you always in the same place and on the same hardware?

If you are, has anything been done recently on the computer besides surfing? New programs, even innocuous stuff? Plug-ins or add-ons?

Had any autoupdates come down the pipe recently, as there have been a spate of zero day fixes they've been patching for, and unrelated consequences are common with those things.

How regular are there issues? I pretty regularly have the same issue with Gmail / Yahoo Mail / and Hotmail over inferior internet connections, as they require a number of handshakes and sub-component referrer sites to download. If even one hangs it often kills the process.

On a weird coincidence, you could be some strange, lingering remnant of the server crash that happened last Monday, where a Latvian router fed bad IDs to a bunch of Cisco routers and tripped a multi-referral bug. I wouldn't put too much faith in that though.

Most amazing jew boots

No problem, although who knows if I'll be able to help you. Best I can offer are suggestions.

At this point, it seems like its a question of trying to do problem dissection / compartmentalization. One at a time, and in combined groups, you might try swapping for a roaming IP and disabling the various scanners and firewalls you have running. Also be sure to check the Win Security Settings to make sure it hasn't re-enabled something stupid of its own accord. On an off shot, you might also try removing the immunizations (I think this is possible within the program, or with an uninstall / reinstall) An uninstall, destruction of directory, and reinstall of Firefox might also be a quick check.

One annoying issue it could be is that those sites are using referrals to other ad / third party sites which one of your security products has decided it doesn't like and is causing the connection as a whole to drop. This could create intermittent connection failures as they are randomly rotated.

If all fails, you can also try restarting Windows in Safe Mode (but with net functionality) and see if that solves your problem. If it does, then you can track down what sub-processes weren't started during that boot.

Edit: Good point from Zerg in between my reply, and if you have a friend with a laptop you could also try that. Also, router kill/restart.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Glad to hear one of the suggestions worked. Not sure at the moment why the static IP might have changed its behavior, although it could be something farther downstream about how your ISP is handling IP traffic. They may be doing something like IP filtering to try and limit certain types of traffic and its having the unintended consequence of hampering your web loads.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

My mom's from there, so I actually visited in my youth every once in a while to see family and such. Even being half Canadian though, not too much danger of needing internet in Montreal these days unless my job sends me that way.

Honestly, I'm pretty convinced that all major ISPs in the mainland N. America are awful, and the small ones aren't a whole lot better, as most have to contract out for backbone to the major ones. Comcast seems like they've got one privacy slight or big brotherish scheme they're embroiled in every other day, AT&T is known to have backbone monitors in several of their hubs, Bells got horrible service in the US at least, and Qwest aggressively tries to invade markets like Walmart by pricing at a loss until locals starve and then jack rates. Not sure who the heck you should go to.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?