Many programs not working on neighbor's wifi

I've been using my friend's wireless network, but certain programs are having issues. Pidgin are Liferea don't work, Chromium seems to be the only usable browser (Midori and IceCat get "server not found" errors), Bittorrent (Transmission/µTorrent) works fine. I've tested these programs on my laptop and desktop. Network proxy settings look fine, everything is set to autodetect.

what kind of router does the friend have? Any weird firewalls up?

Sounds like a bad DNS setting or server.

Can you try manually setting a DNS server? Do you have to use the proxy? Does it work without the proxy?

-Gooney0