Certain programs not connecting to internet

A friend of mine just bought a new laptop with windows 7 a week ago and has a belkin N150 router. After setting up the network everything was running fine and fast. Internet explorer and frostwire both worked plenty fine, but thats it. Firefox and Opera browsers both say they cannot connect to the internet, nor does the uTorrent program, and when we tried to use the mcafee antivirus from comcast it keeps coming up with an error along the lines of "unable to establish connection".

Well naturally I disabled both windows and the router's firewalls...still no luck. Then I plugged in the ethernet cable directly to the laptop, skipping the router...still no luck. Unless Comcast has some sort of stranglehold on which programs it will allow to use its internet, I believe it to be a windows issue. I have only worked with XP primarily and i know little about win7. What would cause only internet explorer to have connections and leave everything else out?

Sometimes an antivirus or antispyware program will not let programs connect. See if disabling Windows Defender (in Services) helps.

You might also need to flush the DNS cache:
Open a command prompt...from the Start menu,
select Run > In the box/"open field", enter cmd.exe
enter ipconfig /flushdns press 'enter'