I seem to have isolated the internet lock up problem on my 2 week old SVE1513 . Its cause: MACAFEE. This was the 30 day trial that Sony so kindly installed with Win8.
The crunch came when Macafee told me a site I wished to access was dubious and prevented me accessing it. Since I know the site owner, and site contents (it lists 78rpm records!), this was utter rubbish. So I uninstalled Macafee and immediately was able to run Vaio update and download the Atheros Bluetooth driver (~200MB and 15 minutes), which has constantly failed to download before.
I'd also experienced Macafee preventing proper operation of Outlook2003 on this laptop before this, and suspect it could be linked to many lockups I've had with File Explorer.
I've just retired after 35 years as a hardware/software designer and the amount of problems I've seen caused by Macafee and the like in that time are countless.You should not be afraid to remove it, especially since the new Win8 firewall provides good protection against stealth attacks, Use a simple, non intrusive, virus detector (I'd recommend the free, open source ClamWin), and virus scan everything you download before you install.
So if you have internet lockups, don't follow the Sony advice to refresh and eventually reload the whole of Win8 (which also means reloading and trying to re-licence any software you've installed) - just try removing Macafee or any other commercial virus protection you have installed.
Sony please note: You may get a fee for including Macafee, but you are shooting yourself in the foot in terms of product reputation.
