FTP Gremlin Please Help

for the love of god I am going to smash all my computer hardware to f n pieces!

After a parade of hardware failures I bought this Dell Inspiration B120, it's running xp home sp3.

After finally getting it up to some speed and remembering my stored ftp password I THOUGHT I was ready to get back to work, only to find 24 hrs later a "winsock connection refused" error. Long story short, I did a system restore to 24 hrs prior and turned off Automatic updates (which had happened in the mean time) and considered it good.

Well, that was about 8 hrs ago and near as I can tell was locked out SOMEHOW, again I guess about 5 hrs later.

I am currently looking for logs etc (I'm not that tech savvy but not ignorant) in the system that may note the event, and preparing to do a restore and all my freaking ftp work in the window!

I have NOT reinstalled the OS since I have gotten this NB and will when I can, interestingly this NB will not surf to Google or Yahoo Search. Anyone got any Ideas? thanks in advance