ESS blocking access to certain sites (without warning)?

I've been having this problem ever since I installed Windows 7, and ESS 4 in this computer. Never had this problem on my other machine, which runs XP and ESS 3.

The thing is, whenever I point my browser to google (or try to run a google search), Facebook, or any other handful of assorted websites, I get webpage not available errors every time no matter how many times I refresh, which browser I use (I'm a Chrome user, but I always keep Firefox in my pc in case I need it, and even got desperate and tried with IE.), or any other parameters unless I disable the firewall, which I'm not that comfortable doing all that often.
I tried clearing out every single user-defined firewall rule, but it didn't seem to work out.

Tried searching around, but I couldn't find anyone with a similar problem. I would really appreciate having some light shined on this for me.

Thanks in advance

 

Do you have ESS version 4.0.437 installed?

 

Nope, running 4.0.424 now

 

Does installing the latest version make a difference or not?