i'm in some real trouble here. help!

[paradive]

so last night i let firefox update itself. what a mistake that was!
ever since, it can't detect a network connection and says "can't find
server". IE has been doing the same thing ever since i installed SP2
(vista) which is why i was solely using firefox even though since WMP
relies IE to look up cds, so it couldn't. so i got me another media
player but now it can't connect to the internet either.
so i got me Chrome, which i'm using now. so i obviously have a network
connection (albeit, dialup). also thunderbird and soulseek work and
nothing else does and the network and sharing center says there ISN'T
a connection. i thought that since i shut down my firewall a while ago
it might still have left something running in the background. so i ran
task manager -> processes and nothing was there. then i got and ran
enumprocess but, once again, nothing there.
as a last ditch effort i ran ipconfig \all and what i THINK shows up
as my modem says DHCP is not enabled so i went to ipv4 and ipv6
properties and both are checked to "obtain dns server address
automatically" though it seems that's a different thing altogether.
any ideas?

p.s. please respond to me directly at felo.de.sade (at) gmail (dot)
com as i don't expect to be checking back here.
p.p.s. PLEASE HELP!