I don't know what wclc is, but many sites use Google fonts and Google APIs, so that could be from a page loading.

The following article lists most connections made for Firefox's internal purposes, and how to manage them: How to stop Firefox from making automatic connections.

See also the about:networking page.

The WCLC site is the Western Canadian Lotto Center, I site that I occasionally visit to check to see the winning lottery numbers (sadly, it never shows my numbers but...)

The thing is, my router log shows the traffic going out (and yes, I understand the google parts) but FF never actually shows the website. And my default page is about:blank. This doesn't happen every time I load FF, so I am curious why this would happen at all.

Its like someone is monitoring when I start FF, and I can see no logical reason for it to be going there. The website is not bookmarked anywhere, I manually type the address in when I want to go look. I suspect that somehow, the "remnants" are left over and are being stored somewhere. This has happened about 5 times in the last 6 months.

Looked at about:networking, didn't see anything unusual or weird there.

Does your about:serviceworkers page list any sites that you haven't connected to yet?

Sorry for the slow response.. Service Worker? Interesting page.. There were listings for sites I haven't been to in years. Many I deleted.

However there were none that had any association with WCLC.

You can edit your host file to stop unwanted connections. https://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/block-websites-using-hosts-file/ You should run Autorun from MS to see what's staring when your computer boots up and Process Explorer for a deeper dive into what's running and by who. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

Ah, been using SysInternals stuff for ages.. There is nothing out of the ordinary found, other than a couple of auto runs entries where files were not found, and those were unchecked..

As for the hosts file, I actually use a program called PeerBlock, which makes things a bit easier. Especially when I combine that with my router logging program which runs in real time. If there is something there I don't like, then I can copy that IP and paste it into PeerBlock.