Notepad.exe and possible malware

I've had Win7 64 Ultimate for about 2 years now. I'm also running Comodo for firewall and Avast for anti-virus and am fairly familiar with all of these now.

I opened notepad to make a generic text list and while changing the font, notepad tried connecting to the internet? I use notepad (and wordpad) OFTEN and I don't remember notepad ever trying to connect to the internet before, and no logs of it trying in the past. I denied it for obvious reasons. I checked the running process in task manager then went to it's folder location and scanned it. It came back OK, and also still has creation and last modified listed as 2009. Thoughts?

Also, not sure if it's related or not, but I am/was running "Grooveshark" playing a music playlist in a open window in the background and twice I've been alerted by Avast that it blocked "http://afe.specificclick.net/?l" as malware. (I then copied and pasted the address from the warning directly to Avast's site blocking function just to make sure it's completely blocked, then later copied THAT from Avast-meaning I'm not sure if the "?!" were part of the original address) Basically, Grooveshark was running while I was napping, 2 alerts came up about the blocked url while sleeping. After waking up I eventually opened notepad to make a text reminder about something else and Comodo warned me notepad.exe wanted internet access.

Anyone else find any of this odd? Grooveshark does monitor for long periods of idle, and will "pause" the songs if inactivity for too long occurs (need to start putting the laser optic mouse on the top mount fan to make think I'm doing something   ), so I'm not sure if the url being blocked has to do with that or not. Either way, several odd things happening around the same time get's my attention, especially when I'm in *tune* with how the system is supposed to run.