I can tell you that on my setup using a magnet link from one Win XP (LW 5.3.6) to the other Win XP (LW 5.4.6) worked fine & downloaded very fast. A 68 MB file downloaded in 5-10 seconds. No doubt that was replicable of using LAN speeds.

In your scenario, you may wish to put up a totally new file up for share that there's no chance of anybody else sharing. Then Search for that file using the other Win XP's LW.

Thank you very much for your advice and comments, ill try to implement them as soon as i can and get back to you with the results. Just to let you know, the host machine is running windows XP aswell, and should be configured inline with the virtual machines, but as you say i will check firewall settings and exceptions on both virtual machines and the host, as that may be an issue. You say that you achieved fast download speed between your virtual machines, this is exactly what i am trying to achieve myself, sharing a file that no one else has access to purely in order to generate some evidence that a file search and transfer has actually taken place. Ill post up here if i come up against any problems. (or if it works first time!)

Thanks and regards,

Will