Thanks for the replies, but after some more searching I was able to fix the problem. It turned out that I had to remove one of the "*.lastUpdated" which was preventing one of my plugins (Maven Surefire Plugin) from updating. I did this manually, because a maven clean wasn't doing it apparently.
The problem was that the "*.lastUpdated" file for a plugin was blocking the maven check for updates and not allowing a necessary jar to get downloaded.