A friend sent me this tonight and it may answer your problem:

"A certificate which Verisign used for signing SSL certificates has expired.
When applications which depend on that certificate try to make an SSL
connection, they fail and try to access crl.verisign.com, the certificate
revocation list server. This has effectively DOS'ed that site, and Verisign
has now updated the DNS record for that address to include several non-
routable addresses, reducing the load on their servers. Some applications
affected include older Internet Explorer browsers, Java, and Norton
Antivirus (which may manifest itself as Microsoft Word being very slow to
start)."

Read for more details:
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/01/08/1849245.shtml?tid=126&tid=128&
   tid=172&tid=95

Verisign's notice:
http://verisign.com/support/vendors/exp-gsid-ssl.html

David Gillett

                         PCSOFT's List Owner's:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>