Help! mail fails?

[gov]

I would be grateful for help from a more computer savvy person. I have a gateway laptop, works well. About a week ago, I upgraded the norton system works and internet security to the '05 version. Everything seemed fine for a while. I have a wireless system in my home, with Netgear 108 mbps wireless firewall router model WGT624.

Yesterday, I had trouble with email, in that mailwasher pro (and then to outlook 2003) was initially able to check my two pop3 email accounts, but after about 3 minutes, it was unable to connect to the server, and gave me error messages about the internet connection being down. But, during this time, I can surf the web in IE and firefox. If I reboot, I again get 3-4 minutes of being able to check my email before it fails to connect.

I've tried disabling the internet security settings, but that doesn't seem to help. I suspect I just have a switch set wrong, but I'll be darned if I can figure it out. Could some kind computer wizard please give me a suggestion or two?

[Oleron]

A couple of things come to mind.

First, the problem seemed to coincide with the upgrade to Norton 2005, so a good place to start would be to uninstall this product completely and reboot. Does the problem still occur?

Second, the hardware firewall might be blocking the 2 ports used for mail transport. Check the Netgear settings and specifically the POP and SMTP ports (110 for POP and 25 for SMTP). Make sure they are both open.