Actually, I'm having a similar problem getting to a system running a java application(requires the latest version of the sun java client) running on my home LAN.
When I turn off avast, it works fine. With avast turned on, it either takes 10 minutes to load or gets the same error as mentioned in the first post.
I've even turned-off each individual provider without success.
Being new to this forum, does support look at these posts?