> and I get these slow speeds regardless of what the other
> client is running on

In reality, the people you are downloading from might not really have a T1 connection (yes, it's possible for person X to lie about their connection speed).

With that said, there are tons of factors that can influence your download speeds. One of them is number of concurrent uploads the persons your are downloading from has going on. Or they could have a lot of host connections. Maintaining host connections requires a lot of bandwidth. If person X has 20 host connections, a large portion of their bandwidth is being sapped up by them.

There's tons of different other reasons, and you'll figure them out eventually.

> when I run llimewire I'm asked to insert a floppy

You're not sharing your floppy drive are you?