I occasionally download, from more than one website, .xls files containing
financial data. I do so by right clicking on the file name, selecting €œsave
target as,€� giving it a name and hitting save.
Within the past few weeks, the downloads have gotten very slow. They may
start out at 800 bytes per second, then go to 122 bytes per second, then 42
then 25€¦None of my other internet functions [browsing, e-mail, etc. have
slowed down; just the downloading of .xls files.] Even small files of 25 kb
now take many minutes to download. Clearly something is wrong.
Any ideas or suggestions?

thanks in advance for any help you can give me on this,
Geoff