Ok, I've had to take a huge chunk of humble pie and actually come and ask for help, under normal circumstances I can fix my own problems but this one has me bamboozled. I am having problems connecting some programs to the internet, the first I noticed was Steam. As such I googled steam connection problems (internet browsing still works incidentally) and had no luck with any of the advice on the forums I found. Quite by accident I loaded spotify and it could not connect, also noticed so far that Bittorrent isn't connecting either, Sky Player is connecting but is a very unstable connection. These are the only ones I have noticed but programs I use very regularly. Now port forwarding is set up for Bittorrent and steam, and both of these were working yesterday, and Bittorrent was working earlier on today. I have made no drastic changes to any settings anywhere and installed no other software. So any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Have you tried a system restore back to yesterday when things seemed to be working?

Also check your firewall exceptions to make sure these apps are checked.