... It turned out that when norton has the popups saying blah blah is trying to connect to the internet, accept or deny, she put deny... but somewhere there is a list of things it has blocked or allowed...
Yeah, it's easy to make that mistake; I've had a number of clients do the same thing.
Binoirm, here are a few things to try:
1. Re-enable Norton and reboot; just having turned it off and then back on
might have cleared up the glitch.
2. Look through Norton's list of allowed/blocked programs as nizzy1115 suggested; you may very well find something(s) blocked that should not be.
3. Norton's Internet Security package has a "Program Scan" feature which looks at your installed programs and tries to automatically create a list of access rules for all of the programs which are known to need network/Internet access. It is the Program Scan feature which generates the original list that nizzy1115 mentioned, and sometimes that list gets corrupted (for reasons beyond the comprehension of we mere mortals).
I've had situations where I needed to remove
every program in the list and then force a manual program scan in order to restore the correct network access rights.
This page on Symantec's support site has a walkthrough on using the Program Scan feature.