Firewall suddenly blocks acess

I don't know what the heck is causing this but when I first boot ESET Smart Security is working fine, but eventually (and the time this takes to happen seems to vary) I suddenly can not access the web or check my e-mail. I CAN get on IRC for example though.

At first the only way I knew to resolve this was too just reboot but nor it turns out "Protocol Filtering" is the cause of this. Turn it off and I can use my browser and check my e-mail. I can't figure out what exactly is triggering this. I'd blame some application I have running. (Besides ESET all I'm running that offers some sort of online protection is Ad-Muncher); but all is well when I boot for a unspecified amount of time. It SEEMS that something else it triggering this problem in ESET Smart Security but I have no ides what.

I don't want to turn off a feature of the program to so i can get online and check my e-mail whenever I want. Anyone have any suggestions here??

TIA

 

Just to follow-up my own post; a little more info.

All was working well when I rebooted my machine I eventually decided to start Steam because my problem occurred before in connection (maybe) to Steam. When I ran Steam the stuff in "community" tab would not show up. This I believe is just a link to a URL. Steam seemed to lock up and I had to quit it. If was after this that I could not not get online or read my e-mail.

Running Opera for example it seems that Opera makes the request the request for the web page it wishes to load but the data never makes it back to Opera. The happens in Firefox and Thunderbird.

Don't know why the URL in Steam didn't load when up to that point I was having no problem in Firefox. But this seemed to be the trigger that prevented HTTP and POP3 data from going to the application that requested that data.