I have completely rid of all antivirus services
...Norton. I disabled all symantec services completely, and ensured the services were not coming back up on restart, or during any actions. I even tried safemode w/ networking and that didn't do it. I finally uninstalled norton completely, even though all its services were disabled prior with no success, which should have done nothing, fixed it.
Does this not mean norton IS a virus? It also required a tool (from their site) to uninstall, as add/remove does not work in any way to remove it.
I'm really curious how it can completely override internet activity with all the services disabled though..? I'm beside myself lol.
@Brucey, pings were working just fine as well, but access to anything except website content through IE wasn't possible. Downloads were fine as well through IE.