That's an amazing difference Hook!  I reckon it's your ISP.  Mine went to a crawl for a while this afternoon too.

Try another ISP.
If in UK (sorry didn't check) go to http://www.freeuk.com.

You can get a phone number without user/pass to log on. See if its just as slow with them.

If it is, then its either (a) your phone line, or (b) your modem. To test (a), take ur computer to a friends house and use the FREEUK number. if it works, its the phone line!

If not, then its your modem. Check for latest drivers (good luck!) or replace - they are quite cheap. Remember ask for HARDWARE modem.

Do no use onboard (AMR) modem - they are baaaaaad

Wellllllll  after lengthy talks with ISP blah blah blah  > they still insisted it wasn't them and to check gain on phone etc and to check for any anomilies?<< is that spelt right  

Thought it was strange though as I ran spybot and found no spyware to speak off so ran Adaware and OHHH MY GOD    found 74 WILD TANGENT issues and another few that Spybot didnt pick up and now everything seems to be a bit more stable coincidence or not Only time will tell.

Many thanks to those that have had an input.  

PS Wild Tangent was mentioned a bit earlier in another thread, be careful  

Hookstar

This may be of interest too Hook.

HP's Keyboard Spyware
There is some interesting news for all you happy(?) owners of Hewlitt Packard Pavilions out there, to say the least. It seems that if you have the "One touch multimedia keyboard", you also have some spyware software by Netropa pre-installed. The executable for this is "mmkeybd.exe".

This is nothing new for HP however, since they are also the proud purveyors of other phone home apps such as Wild Tangent Games and Backweb, both of which are known to be violators of your privacy.

Similar to any trojan horse program, the keyboard pings a server at regular intervals to keep the internet connection alive when you are using a dialup connection. If you use any of the keyboard's hot keys, this software also uses redirects. HP contends that these redirects are for market research so that future keyboards will have the functions customers use most... Sure.

There is no fully satisfactory solution to this problem as far as I know. If you disable mmkeybd.exe with msconfig for example, you will lose the volume control and other internet features of the keyboard. A firewall seems to be the answer, but the executable will still try to ping every second and will continue to attempt the redirects every time you use a hot key; even if the firewall stops it from communicating, it is still using up a certain amount of your resources.

Which firewall to use is an important consideration: you will want one that works to detects and stop both incoming and outgoing communication, and many firewalls only concern themselves with the incoming signals, which are totally ineffective for most spyware. On my own PC I use ZoneAlarm and it does the job without disabling any of the keyboard's features. If you use another type of firewall, just be sure that it will detect and stop any outgoing data.

If you want to see a little more information on the subject, try this link to HP's own forum. As of the date of this writing, the link is still viable.

http://sitebilder.com/hosting/privacy/articles/hp.php

Problem resolved thanks to BT, there was an earth leak on my line and it was corupting the information being sent to the Modem   and in turn stopping/reloading info back and forth.

So everybody that had an input one way and another I thank you for your help  .

Hookstar

That was a very interesting site, Clive.  I have an HP Pavilion with multimedia keyboard and I never use the one touch buttons but do use the sound control ones.  After reading all the users commments, I am going to update the keyboard driver. Also, I never knew what "Backweb" meant and thought it was something necessary to the system. I am going to uninstall it also.  I would hope this will help all these files that ad-aware keep finding. Wish me Good Luck

Here's another interesting article regarding HP multimedia keyboards
http://wwr.usonline.com/news/ournews.cfm?newsitem=9807

I've had this HP for 3 years and didn't know that backweb was a spyware programme pre-installed by HP.  I have uninstalled it. Just as well I wasn't in any of Clive's favourite haunts