So far giving full access to Avast's various pieces in ZA and then setting up the proxy in Firefox has worked, but I'll keep testing. I've not done much today, and my problems with my connection often spur from prolonged use. If I don't do anything, the working connection lasts longer. So we'll see. I'll also reboot either tonight or tomorrow and see what happens. My ISP is supposed to be doing an update tonight or tomorrow night so that might throw me a little. We'll see.
Edit/Update:
For some reason my connection works for everything for the most part without problems, but it still goes dead with Firefox after a while of use. So if I close and reopen it, it works again, but it's still stalled and slow, often requiring me to reload a page to get everything to load. I setup the proxy for web shield(is it?), but that doesn't seemed to have solved my problem. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm stumpted as to what's causing this.