3G upgrade to 4.1 after downgrade

[metalboy4]

I have an iPhone 3g that I had updated to ios4.0 in which I had terrible slowdowns with. I downgraded it to 3.1.3 in iTunes but it had gotten stuck in the recovery mode. I used RECBOOT to kick it out of recovery mode and all is well.
I now want to update/restore to 4.1. The update is taking way too long on the backup so I have been trying the restore with no backup. My problem is this: each time I do the restore I get message saying it could not contact Apple software upgrade server. Does anyone have any suggestions to why/how to fix this?

Win 7, x64, iTunes 10.0.1

 

[metalboy4]

*fixed*

Found my own problem and posting my answer. For some reason the hosts file has changed. I followed the info in this page to delete the line for gs.apple.com saved file and then my contact to server was fine.

Page link: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2480871