Firefox Failed to Connect or How I grew to Hate Symantec

I updated Firefox. Or rather, I let Firefox update, and when it came back up, it didn't. The application worked just fine as long as you just look at local files. If it was interwebs browsing you had in mind, well that was another story. I say "was" because through much headache, I figured out what the problem was.
I'm pretty handy with Google, so armed with the best search engine and the second best browser (i.e. IE), I went on a hunt. (Oh, and by the way, notice how IE still works? The least secure browser gets a pass -- what's that about???) Everywhere I went the response was the same: "turn off the firewall for that application". So I found the windows firewall settings. There happen to be like 3 different versions of these settings in Vista. You can control logging in one version, so I turned logging on. I watched the file, and ran Firefox. No change. So, either the logging wasn't working, or the firewall wasn't blocking Firefox.
I did some more poking around, and I found that you may have some other firewall running. This is particularly (and peculiarly) true if you had Norton on your machine at one time. I bought this laptop on a Black Friday deal after waiting in line for 2 1/2 hours. It came with anti-virus, but the one it came with wasn't installed, so I gave that to the wife as I don't usually -- actually, I never run anti-virus. Why should I? I'm careful, and I haven't been bit yet. Anything dangerous happens on a Linux machine. The hitch here is the laptop came with a trial version of Norton. I let it live until it started bugging me about my trial running out. That got annoying very quickly so I uninstalled it -- or so I thought.
Even if you uninstall Norton, you never truly uninstall it unless you remove it. Turns out Symantec made a special tool for this. It's easy -- just go to their ftp site and download it. Unless the firewall that is impossible to get to is blocking ftp. It's not is it??? Oh yes, it is. Unbelievable.
Well I found the tool on an http download, ran it, and everything seems to be ok. I really don't want to reinstall Vista if I can get around it.
Just a quick word about a very useful app. Someone made a tool called EnumProcess that told me I had Norton firewall still running. So here's to you EnumProcess person...