do you have something like SpybotS&D or something similar installed? This program lists hunderds of entires into the hosts file, and stuff like that ... I had it installed before I had to reset my whole system, and had the same issue ... FF would take ages to get online ... after a clean install, I haven't installed S&D yet, and internet seems to work fine ... I would also look at the firewall settings ... I had customized Comodo in the earlier install, but have left it more or less on defaults now ... I suspect it is one of these two which caused the super-slow connect speeds earlier ... all the best ...
