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tcpview, and with your torrent clients closed, open it, and see if you see a ridiculous amount of connections with TIME_WAIT status, or overall just a lot of connections. if you do, then they might be left over when your torrent client was trying to rape your socket stack and they all got stuck in the queue and now windows is confused as hell. so, in conclusion, try rebooting and see if browsing works, before you open any torrent clients.
and in fact, it would be worth applying that eventid 4226 patch regardless, as I've found that windows can be quite temperamental with how it decides to do stuff when it's only got 8 half-open connections to work with, and it does no harm anyway (as long as you aren't infected with worms).
.. that just reminds me, it could be a worm creating 100 threads and trying to find exploitable machines by scanning large IP ranges, which obviously wouldn't happen in linux. if it is, you'll see lots of connections in tcpview when you try.
