I've been hunting for this thing on my roommate's computer for two days now, with no luck. Browser claims that it's possibly a firewall problem, and port 80 appears to be blocked, but I've been pretty thorough checking the firewall (he was using windows firewall, not much help there.) It won't let him system restore, and it won't let him view any webpage in the browser except for archived stuff in offline mode, regardless of IE or Mozilla (He doesn't have chrome or opera installed). My websearches don't find anything that really resembles this one, and none of the windows 7 boxes in the house seem to have this problem.
I'm open to ideas at this point.