A few days ago I put my new laptop on ZoneAlarm and suddenly could not get connected to Free Republic...I tried and tried and then discovered that by changing to ZoneAlarm I had also switched my default search engine to Google. When I switched to MSN Live Search, I could get FR again, as you can see.......
I'm using Zone Alarm and haven't changed the default search engine or start page from Google, and I've never had any problem getting FR after installing, and between various versions and various computers I've probably installed 20 times. I think something went wrong during your install or your install just happenned to coincide with one of FR's accursed outages.