Solved Cannot connect to any open port

I have a desktop computer that I haven't started for around half a year. Last week, when I started it, it made a lot of updates and later when I wanted to connect my laptop to it, it didn't work. This used to work in the past, so I started to debug the issue. I have Avast antivirus and the Windows Firewall enabled, I thought they might block something, so I disabled them, but still no luck. The ping works though and the desktop is able to connect to the internet (the browser works), but no incoming connections can be established. I don't think it is a router issue because not even my attempts to connect to the local ftp server installed on the desktop via 127.0.0.1 didn't work.
When I try to connect to the localhost on any port using putty I get a "Connection refused" network error.

Any ideas what can cause this?

Welcome to SF,

Please uninstall Avast for now by using this Utility tool.

If issue still persist after removing Avast please post an ipconfig /all output for review?
Click on Start => in run or search box type cmd, choose run as Admin and press enter. Open up a command prompt then Copy and Paste these ipconfig /all >c:\ipconfig.txt . Please attach the .txt file to be found in your Local Disk 'C' on your next post.

Removing Avast did the trick, thanks a lot! Now I have to see why is Avast causing this problem in the first place.

Glad that's an easy fix. You shd try MSE.

viper78 said:

Removing Avast did the trick, thanks a lot! Now I have to see why is Avast causing this problem in the first place.

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You're Welcome.