Answer Base

Disabling firewalls and spyware checks makes no difference. also no p2p running.

The internet is made up of many thousands of computers and even more routers and service pathways. the path that you have direct access to is your computer, your router, your modem. that is the tip of the iceberg. open a command prompt and use the tracert command with the website or ftp site that you are downloading from, and you will see hops though many services and routers along the way. if you see 30 such hops; then you can see where the slowdown is... the more hops, the slower your download. of course, the connection, bandwidth and traffic load at the download site is also significant and out of your control. so it may simply be slow at their end. so... get over it. good luck and happy computing!