But there are different ways for a TCP connection to fail. In my tcpdump output above, my attempt to connect to port 80 and my attempt to connect to port 443 failed in two different ways: the first with an ICMP error (from a firewall) and the second with a TCP reset packet (possibly from your server itself).
If you do telnet localhost 80 and you get
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
then you're not seeing the same error that people out on the Internet are seeing, and it's not coming from the same place or the same reason!