Thanks snoopy.
It's kinda weird because I had already tried that, choosing a higher upload speed, and even checked the maximum check box, but it didn't make a difference. I know when I originally installed xolox, the setup process asked for information about my connection "low" or "high bandwidth" and I originally chose the low setting for my 56K. I know in BearShare under the Setup-Sharing preferences there is a connection tab that allows one to change the Network Interface speed between modem, broadband, high speed, and Xolox doesn't seem to have this or I can't find it. I unistalled Xolox and re-installed it so that it would let me change my bandwith selection in the installation process but it skips that option now as if it remembers that I had a low bandwidth selection on my original installation.
So I tried this. I freshly installed Xolox on a second computer connected to my DSL network, since this computer had never seen xolox it gave me the option to chose a bandwidth setting, I choose high speed and now I'm downloading at lightning speeds in this second computer but my laptop, computer #1, is still downloading at freakin .5K.
I have to figure out how to remove all references of Xolox on my laptop so that I can re-install it and get the option to choose high speed during setup. GO FIGURE.