YAHOO! I finally got LW to work correctly and obtain decent downloading speeds. I found the password for my router and found out that UPnP was disabled. After enabling it I went back into LW and saw the red wall in front of the globe was gone!
My speeds are not that great (about 15KB/s for a 700Mb cable download), but definitely way much better than before (0-2KB/s)! But this can be fixed by further tuning LW to make it run to the max...

I have to say I couldn't have done this without your wonderful help, so thanks very VERY much for all those who gave up (and are still giving up) some of their time to help people like me. I know you guys aren't paid for this and volunteer to help, so thanks alot!Big thanks to birdy and Grandpa in particular who willingly replied to my posts and gave me some very helpful links.

Thanks guys.

zad