Some Radeon/Intel machines have similar problems as Nvidia's Optimus. Digging around Catalyst may reveal settings for using the "high performance GPU" for stuff; if it does you need to tell it to use that.
OFC as to be expected by ATI/AMD they failed at documenting it so I can't give exact details, only that it exists & can be fixed in Catalyst.

"Not Connected" issues however are usually firewall/net related. See the FAQ for info on that.