suse 9.2 on amd64 wierd error

Hello all I had installed suse 9.2 pro on my amd64 laptop a while back and things seemd to work fine. Then all of a sudden firefox broke and used to crash when i started it. Recently, I did a reinstall and have been observing other wierd errors from the start. Firstly firefox is still broken. When i visit any website (except the default novell page), firefox times out. The same page loads fine in konqueror. When I ran Yast online update, it too is unable to access the cgi page that contains the list of update sites. I copied the cgi-url from its error message and accessed it in konqueror and the page loaded fine !!?? Has anybody encountered similar problems. thanks srinivas