Experiencing Unusually Slow Download Speeds!

[HasSanK]

Lately I have been experiencing unusually slow download speeds. I normally download at around 400kb/s but lately I've been downloading at a max of around 50kb/s.

As far as I know I haven't changed anything in my router/firewall settings so that shouldn't be the problem.

I've also tried many different download locations/websites to make sure it wasn't just the site I was downloading from that was causing the slow speeds, but every place I download from is the same. I play online games such as Counterstrike: Source & Guild Wars, and the gameplay is suffering because of these slow speeds (in the form of lag, dropped connections etc).

I am using Virgin Media Cable Broadband with a "Scientific Atlanta" cable modem. The modem is hooked up to a Linksys WRT54GS router which I use to provide wireless Internet to my laptop at times. I thought that the slow speeds may possibly be because the laptop is sharing the Internet with my PC so I turned my Laptop off but I still experienced the slow speeds.

Also, I just checked my running processes and I had 2 processes running called msnmsgr.exe which I assume is Windows Live Messenger which was open at the time.

The thing is, I closed Windows Live Messenger (5,000K memory usage) but there was still an extra msnmsgr.exe in the processes list (35,000K memory usage). When I tried to end the process it won't let me at all. I've tried over & over but it won't end. This along with the high memory usage seemed suspicious to me. Could this be part of the problem?

Anyway, I'm sure you get many threads like this and it may seem cliche but I'm just out of ideas as to what could be the problem. I'd very much appreciate all the help I can get, thank you.


HK