I don't know who this will help, but it worked for me. I was having the problem of slow DL speeds, stalling DL's problems connecting ETC. I tried all of the fixes stated here and none of them worked for me. Here is what I did.

1) Right click My Computer and choose Properties.
2) Click hardware tab (winxp)
3)Choose device manager
4) Open up network adapters
5)Double click on your network card used to hit the net.
6)Click on Advanced tab
7)In the Property box highlight Optimize for
8)Under the Value change it to Throughput
9) Click ok and Enjoy being able to connect and DL