Hi Robert, it was a lot of trial and error, I just did some research online, tried a few tips/steps, I thought the clearing the DNS made sense with my slow downloads, and I had a problem last year with have the "-" (dash) sign in the phone number section of the account and it stalled my account, a few months later I had the "#" sign in the address and that caused problems connecting.
What I think that could have happened is Apple updated their prerequisites for our we list our account information. For example, when I enter the phone number, update, the account takes out dash. It could be that they listed or updated those prerequisites and that's why I couldn't connect. I was just going through everything trying to isolate "x" and finally those seemed to work, updating the account, taking out any symbols in the address, and clearing the DNS cache.
I hope others can get theirs working as well, I know how frustrating it is, it totally messed up our "Friday Movie Night" lol Smooth Sailing so far = )