Cable internet seemingly capped to 20kb/s for no reason

Hi, I've been having a strange problem - it seems that my internet is running exceedingly slow lately, and I have no idea why.

I'm sharing an internet connection with 2 other room mates who use the internet via wireless, and as far as I know they have had no problems. They aren't heavy users, and don't leave P2P programs running.

Personally, I connect straight to the router, which is in my room, via a cat 5 cable. I've tried changing the cable, swapping to different ports on the router and it made no difference.

I have a sneaking suspicion it might be some kind of virus - even now while I'm sitting here on this page, my traffic meter is going nuts in Zone Alarm, I have no other explorer or firefox windows open. On that point, I've tried both firefox and the latest IE - happens in both.

I'm running WinXP with SP2. Any ideas what could be happening to me?

 

what is your cable internet service level ?
Many providers have "lite packages " that are at this level
They will keep changing the names of these services to confuse and be able to sell the lower level to consumers.
If your speed has decreased then it well may be malware
Try another computer on your network with only that computer online
to diagnose
It may be possible that somehow your service level got reduced accidentally or even as a prank
You mentioned that the other users are wireless
Check your router lan area to note if any other users have accidentally logged on

 

My cable did that, malware, downloaded tools to remove, been flying for quite sometime now. You have another computer hogging BW?