new hd win setup issues

Hey all

I feel rather silly asking about this, but after 7 hours working on it by myself with the same results I'm about to pull my hair out.

Recently I bought a decent seagate 120g hard drive to replace the dinosaur I was using. Installation went ok, and windows boots up fine. These were my first installs/updates:

Norton Internet Security
Peer Guardian 2
Spybot
Adaware
Firefox

Once I got my core programs installed everything started going to crap. Even with norton and PG disabled my MSN messenger keeps giving me this error message saying I'm not connected to the internet even with all my apps disabled. If I uninstall MSN and reinstall it it will work until I reboot.

My manual windows update opens IE and will check my PC for needed updates, but I get no options for downloadable updates. I get this:

"The website has encountered a problem and cannot display the page you are trying to view. The options provided below might help you solve the problem. " "Error number: 0x80072F78" I get this even with my core apps disabled.

My Computer description says I only have XP SP1 installed and my automatic updates no longer manually or automacially install or download even if I uninstall my core apps. I've repartitioned twice today with the same result and it's really starting to piss me off. I've never had this much trouble with a reformat.

It feels like my hd is saving some data, but not all of it. I installed winamp, winrar, and winzip and they all work fine after rebooting, but windows based applications like IE and MSN come up with no connection errors. I'm at a complete loss.

Any help is greatly appreciated. TY