Yeah, welcome to LW!

I'm nowhere near technical enough to understand that indepth article on pings and pongs. But I do know that I, too, download at painfully slow speeds.

If you will read several of the posts on this board, including one I placed recently, you will find you and I are certainly not alone.

Here's a summary of my LW experience:
1) search
2) request d/l of 10 things
3) *might* connect with and receive 2 of those 10 things
4) d/l virtually always at .01 - 5 kb/s

On extremely rare occasion (less than 2% of the time) I am able to d/l at 40-50 kb/s. For the first time ever I actually exceeded 100 tonight!

Seems to me a file sharing program should be faster than this one. But what do I know? And, as others have said, it *is* free - so it's hard to complain too much.