crisis over
For some reason my Norton Firewall had become damaged. When clicking on it it wouldn't open sayin a file was missing and that I had to re-boot. This would come up even after a re-boot. From this I assumed the firewall was off so disregarded it. On Wednesday I decided at midnight to just delete nortan. I had tried everything else so just went for it. This fixed the problem but I have no idea why Norton went strange in the first place.
Thank you all for you suggestions.