Does your Electrum have a green rectangle around it?
No, i also whitelisted it from any virtualization and other modules in Comodo.
have you tried completely uninstalling and reinstalling Electrum from scratch?
yep, also only using the portable version now, so there is no shortcut and the exe doesn't have any commandline arguments either.
The NordVPN IP is quite interesting. I did have that VPN installed on my laptop in the past, but at some point had no need for it anymore so uninstalled it with revo uninstaller pro. I just checked again and can't find any obvious traces in my C:/programs etc. either. But I never configured NordVPN with electrum in any way, so why would electrum now try to connect this way?
Also checked network adapters in windows control panel but there are none from NordVPN (or other VPNs).
EDIT: I solved it! There were no other VPN network adapters, but I found 2 from VMware and 1 from virtualbox. Once I disabled both VMware adapters, electrum was able to connect again immediately. If I turn the adapters back on and restart electrum, it doesn't connect anymore, this is reproducable.
I'm glad I finally fixed this with all you guys' help, but why would electrum try to prioritize and connect via a vmware network adapter instead of just the normal ethernet?