Missing Feeds on Dashboard & Sidebar – plus, no Plugin auto-update

Starting yesterday, I noticed that my widgets for displaying del.icio.us bookmarks and flickr photos in my blog sidebar are showing nothing. When I logged on to check things out from the WordPress innards, I discovered that none of the feeds in the Dashboard are pulling their feeds in, which I found doubly suspicious.

So, I went to look at my Plugins to see if there was anything suspicious going on because I always blame those first. I noticed commentluv, Tag Managing Thing, and My Custom Widgets needed to be upgraded. However, when I clicked on the links to upgrade automatically, which is the only option other than to view info about them, and selected proceed, I got an error saying:

Download failed.: Operation timed out after 30000 milliseconds with 4380 out of 68302 bytes received

Plugin upgrade Failed

This made me triply suspicious.

However, I gave it all the benefit of the doubt that it might be that Vista laptop and that Internet connection; however, I am now on an XP PC in another city, using a different connection and I am having the same result on the next day.

I have cleared the cache using wp-super-cache, which I installed this morning. For a brief moment I managed to see the del.icio.us bookmarks, but the next refresh took them away.

Does anyone know what might be going on? Any suggestions how I can fix it?