Wireless Broadband running ohh sooo slloooowww

I have a Netgear DG834G wireless broadband router showing a downstream connection speed of 4.4Mbps and a Netgear WG111 USB wireless adapter connected to a PC running XP Pro.

The computer shows a wireless connection with approx 50% signal strength (It's quite a way from the router) and a variable connection speed which generally never drops lower than 11Mbps.

So why does surfing the internet feel like i'm using dialup, file downloads take forever and in fact at the moment so does surfing the net! I have NetMeter running at the moment and the fastest speed it has recorded this evening so far was 45KBps, and the average seems to be between 5 and 10KBps.

I know it should be running faster than this, a lot faster, so why isn't it?

any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Lee