Muhammad, You may have hit on something there, after all. It's working much better today. The problem (or at least my complaints) have not been so much the speed as the fact that I get long pauses when the indication is that transmissions have paused, both directions, and my ISP has been trying to convince me that the problem is "noise" on the phone lines. Now that might make sense, except for the fact that only some sites were being affected. Of course, I've admitted in the past to not knowing much about computers, and while I use Windows' disk cleanup regularly, I've never deleted any of the cookies. I guess time will tell, but everything seems to be working better today. Thanks for your help.
Bird