Vista64: No apps connecting to internet except IE

[idea]

Summary: Vista64, working flawlessly for over two full months, now all of a sudden apps are giving me "unable to create socket" errors. But IE works fine!

Yesterday morning my ISP must have been having some sort of DHCP problem but it only lasted for an hour or two. Thing is, when everything was back to normal, Firefox wouldn't work. It can't resolve any addresses it says. So I opened IE, and pages loaded fine. Firefox in addition to not loading pages, also crashes when I close it. I open Thunderbird, it starts crashing too. I open Spybot S&D, try to update definitions, it says "Unable to create socket." I open mIRC to see if my irc buddies can help, it says "unable to create socket". GAIM errors with "Couldn't connect to host.

WTF is going on.

 

[Motley]

Sounds like your TCP/IP protocol stack became corrupted. Try to uninstall your ethernet adapter, reboot. Also, try to remove the IPv6 stack, by unchecking it under LAN properties.

 

[idea]

Uninstalled/reinstalled wired NIC - no change
Uninstalled/reinstalled wireless - no change
Disabled IPv6 - no change (why did you suggest this?)

I also went ahead and reset the TCP/IP stack via netsh, no change

I'm gonna be reinstalling Vista tonight, except this time the 32 bit version, maybe I'll have more luck. I don't know why I ever installed the 64 bit in the first place. The only problems I was having were driver related... until now.