YES! Now this is how posts should be. dweinin has specified most everything! Great.
Now, on to the problem at hand:
First, you must understand that the speeds that are indicated in LW while dlding are in kBs. Your speed, as the ISPs try to sell it, is in kbps. The difference is that 1kbps is 8 times a kBps, so if you saw someone dlding with 130kBps then it's about 1000kbps (which is your max speed).
Now, you must reactivate you antivirus as it has nothing to do with blocking connections.
Next, launch LW and click Tools->Options.
There, go to Uploads, then Basic and set the Upload meter to about -5KBps of your max upload speed, specified by your connection (but in KBs not kbs).
Next, go to Downoads and increase the number of simultaneous dlds by a little. This can be easily misinterpreted as most everyone thinks that this refers to the number of simultaneous different dlds, but it actually refers to the simultaneous identical dlds too: it means that if you try to dld a file with many hosts, the higher the number here, the more hosts LW will try to connect to while dlding. This number must be increased a little at a time until you reach a number that seems optimal for dlding and uploading as too large a number can slow down your speed 'cause LW will use up bandwidth to try to connect to more hosts.
If I remember anything else I'll come back and post again.

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iMac G4 OSX 10.3.9
RAM 256MB
LW 4.10.5 Basic
ADSL anything from 3 to 8Mbps/around 1024kbps

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