Ship ShieldsFollow

I seem to be having problems lately with the shields on enemy ships - they're too powerful! I first noticed the problem when on the Storm Squadron mission rescuing the hostages from the Lok system. I hammered away at the ship for almost ten minutes before realizing that the shields hadn't even decreased 1%. Thinking that for some reason I just wasn't strong enough yet, I went to fight a bunch of tier 1 ships to level up, only to discover that I wasn't damaging their shields either. This really struck me as odd since I was having no trouble fighting any ships up until now (certainly not any tier 1s), but I went ahead and upgraded every component on my ship to grade 3 equipment. Still no difference. So I decided to just give up on this character for a while (since the problem obviously had to be server related) and started a new character on a different server. I went to do the Tansarii space missions and, sure enough, I couldn't beat a single ship. I did however notice that I could do small damage to the shields if I hit them in just the right place, but that weakness would only last for a few blasts and then I'd go right back to doing nothing until finding a new, different weak spot. And some ships still seemed to have no weak spot at all. The only explanation that I was left with was that I must have some sort of virus, but five full scans later the game still won't let me damage any ships. Am I doing something wrong? Have the rules of space combat changed in the past week? I've been playing this game for over a year now and I've never had to do anything but stay on a ship's tail, pump their rear end full of laser, and watch them blow up. Now I have to play "guess the weak spot" and even then a battle against a single ship can take up to half an hour, and they usually just run away after all that time (with their shields at 69% and no damage to the rest). This is really beginning to get on my nerves, but nobody else seems to have this problem, so what could possibly be wrong?

A) When I shoot the target, I don't hit the ship. I could bulls-eye the target and it wouldn't matter - the shots just appear to go right through the ship.

B) In those few instances when I am scoring damage, I'm shooting the ship, not the target.

C) This never happened before. Seriously, for the past year or so I've been having countless dogfights and shooting the ship (not the target) and doing all kinds of damage.

Another point that makes me think there might be something suddenly wrong with the game is that I no longer seem to be able to delete quests. I highlight them in my journal, but there's no button on the bottom that says "Delete Quest" anymore. I don't suppose anybody knows what could be up with that, either?