rubymine failing to load remote gems (Connection refused)

Does anyone else have this problem - i'm seeing it with rubymine 3.1 and 3.1.1 - happening under ubuntu 11.04. I'm connected to the internet via a wireless router. *NO* proxies defined or being used. Yet every time rubymine comes up or i try to start a new project etc, i get these error messages saying it's unable to load remote gems because of a Connection refused error. the specific URL it's trying is http://rubygems.org/specs.4.8.gz which i can get to in my browser just fine.

I double checked the settings in rubymine's http proxy. It's set up not to use a proxy all. I checked my ubuntu network proxy settings and those are set up not to use a proxy either.  

So i can't understand why the program consistently fails to connect. Here's the full error - it's repeated 3 times:

Failed to load remote gems http://gems.rubyonrails.org
(Gem::RemoteFetcher::FetchError)
Errno::ECONNREFUSED: Connection refused - connect(2) (http://rubygems.org/specs.4.8.gz)

Please check proxy settings and gem urls

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.