Yes I did guess you'd used it a lot, but thought I'd suggest it anyway. I have no idea why LW 5 is not giving you decent speeds. You are using LW 5 still? Did you check the speed settings in LW's options settings?

Go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Super Really Advanced -> Performance & disable Ultrapeer. See if that makes any difference.

The faster speeds for Pro is based on two things. One is connecting to 5 ultrapeers instead of 3, so arguably better search results for the harder to find files. And secondly, you can download from a maximum of 10 hosts per file instead of a max of 8 per file with Basic so if downloading from a high no. of hosts should be able to get very fast speeds depending on the hosts of course. There's no 'major' differences really. Originally buying Pro was considered a donation toward their work/efforts/cause, since Basic is free. However, in more recent years they have become a much larger company so ...

You could take this person's advice: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/downlo...unk-files.html
A few of the arguments against Peerguardian is they do not necessarily recheck ip addresses after adding them, so some of them might now be innocent users. Another is the program can be a little memory & cpu hungry on some systems. Another is their website filter has some strange choices. From memory they block this forum, I have no idea why. I'd suggest turning that option off if you decide to use it. lol