I had a similar issue where I've been using GE for a couple of weeks and all of a sudden I couldn't get access to the servers. To make a long story short, it looks like GE uses Internet Explorer settings to determine how to get on the servers. You see, I had my IE set to "Work Offline" and because of that, I was unable to get on. When I re-enabled IE, everything was working normally again. The other thing that queued me was my MS antispyware said it could not get on the Net. Once I re-enabled IE, it was also able to get the info it needed.

Hope it helps.