One thing to consider is that most firewall programs and anti virus are not alike. My downloads were brought to a crawl thanks to Webroot Spysweeper. I tried it in conjunction with PC CILLIN by Trend Micro and anything I tried to download was either brought to a crawl or denied outright. Nothing beats quality anti virus and other protections needed for safe surfing and dependign on your software, OS, and several other factors can speed up or slow down a computer depending on how paranoid you are. Temprarily shutting these extra defenses off and scanning your share folder BEFORE opening any of them should afford enough protection from sneak attacks. I never shut down PC CILLIN since it does everything I need without getting in the way like invasive programs like Webroot Spysweeper (famous for the message "Registry Change Denied" prior to killing your download and with particularly large DLs like some windows updates can lead to HOURS of lost time redownloading the same update) or Norton Anti Virus which I despise for making computers REALLY slow down. It gets into everything and screws with many applications unless you know what you are doing when you set it up and PC CILLIN still blows it out of the water dollar for dollar with great support and constant (although sometimes annoying) updates. It is one of the most proactive defenses I know. I have heard good things about Microsoft's anti virus software but I am sticking with Trend Micro for now. It just works that good for me. The other suggestions really make a lot of sense and I got to thank the others posting these suggestions since I will have to try them and see how it works with the performance of the search engine used here.

Going into the fog is easy. Finding your way home is the tricky part. 4:20