Windows 7: Connected to Internet, TS/Steam Won't Connect?

First of all thanks for taking the time to read this, second of all if this is not the correct forum could this please be moved?

I had some internet trouble the other night, I think the storm must have knocked out a line around my area. My internet randomly disconnected me from TeamSpeak3 (around 2 in the morning, I stay connected usually all night) and my internet was down and I tried power cycling and all of that, resetting and renewing my IP address. So I just gave up because I had some other things to do, and this morning my internet started working again fine.

Here is the weird part. When I try and load say, Skype, it works fine, all webpages load fine as well...but TeamSpeak3 and Steam will NOT connect no matter what I try. TeamSpeak displays that the hostname is resolved fine, so it's not a DNS problem, I've tried using Google's and OpenDNS's servers just for the heck of it anyway, to no avail.

I'm baffled, I've disabled windows firewall (and even tried enabling it) and my AVAST! Shields aren't blocking any of the connections, at least it doesn't show so on the graphs. I got smacked with a DNS changer a few months ago, and successfully removed it, so I'm hesitant to even disable my shields for a few seconds to try connection.

Any further information (an ipconfig /all) can be posted upon request. Thanks!

I guess I should add that I'm running from a router, and I've tried bypassing the router and the same problem persists, and I'm not on a wireless connection.

In order to fix this problem you will definitely want to uninstall Avast using it's special uninstall utility.

avast! Uninstall Utility

The issue fixed itself...randomly...without removing avast, but...

Now every 10 minutes my internet disconnects. Which the problem I had previously. I'm going to uninstall AVAST and use windows firewall and see if my internet works then...the Windows troubleshooter tells me there's DNS problems so I've tried using google and OpenDNS servers and they don't fix the problem. Any help would be appreciated...