first, which country do you live in? if it is really a country the sites do not provide service in, then you may have to use a proxy, and if you are lucky you can settle for a free webproxy.
second, have you tried to do a system wide search (c drive plus any additional partitions you may have) to check for you missing files? my experience is that people refuse to admit that they did something, but short of a very malicious virus, files just does not disappear.
Third, make sure your virus scanner is up to date, since (however unlikely) the files could have been deleted by a virus and/or trojan.