Opera's final straw

Starting on Sunday some time, Opera stopped being able to go to secure sites; it just hangs forever on "Setting up secure connection". I've searched online for people with a similar problem, and while I found a host of situations where someone had that problem with a specific site, I never found any where someone had it with every site.

These same sites work fine in IE and Firefox on the same computer. The problem affects Opera on two different ISPs behind totally different firewalls. I've reviewed settings, then changed them and changed them back just to be sure; I've purged caches and deleted temporary files; and I even ran the installer and let it do a Repair, but no help.

I posted to opera.general but no one there has posted anything useful. I went through the obligatory first few posts of "did you make sure your computer was plugged in" and "you should try doing something that you already said you did but I didn't bother to read your post" and then the thread dried up. No posts from the Opera people themselves.

This is proving to be the final incentive to make me make the switch to Firefox. Now, I don't imagine that this is a fatal failing of Opera; I'm sure if I invested more time, I could fix it, I just don't have the time right now. (I'd probably do a full uninstall and reinstall, then rebuild my settings. Hopefully I could do that without losing my Wand passwords, as that's the biggest thing that I still need Opera around for.) And I don't think that Firefox won't do something similar inscrutable one day; every program does it eventually, and you just figure out how to deal with it.

But I was already considering the move to Firefox, and getting used to the differences between its unfamiliar quirks and Opera's familiar (to me) quirks. I've gotten a collection of add-ons that addresses almost all of the things about Firefox I found lacking, and have been learning to live with the few that remain. So it was mostly waiting for me to make the decision, and to have the time to act on it. I don't have the time, but right now, I have the time to deal with Opera's problem even less, so... here we go. Make Firefox my default browser. Check. Let's hope this doesn't drive me nuts.