the other day i installed service pack 2 (because the new version of AVG required it to work), and the installation seemed to go fine. i did a full updated virus and spyware scan yesterday, cleared temps and cookies and so forth, but ever since my internet has been running really slow. not just a bit slower, but really really almost-stopping slow, taking at least 45 seconds and up to two minutes to load each page, and about a quarter of the time they don't even load cos the connection times out while it's thinking about it, or it seems to freeeze in the middle of loading and just sits there half blank so i have to stop and back and try again (then it still goes slow or times out). it's like i've gone back to dial-up, heh. it's really frustrating me, i'm not paying the extra cost for broadband just to have it act this slow i was wondering if this is normal for SP2 to slow down the internet so very much, i don't particularly want to have to pay double for the fastest broadband available just to go back to the speed i'm used to (pages loading in a second or two). i use firefox, AVG 8, macaffee firewall, spybot search and destroy, and i'm on AOL for my ISP but i don't ever use their built-in browser. i'm not running other programmes at the same time as firefox. well, sometimes, but not all the time so it isn't that i'm trying to run too much stuff at once then wondering why it's slow. it only seems to be the internet which has slowed up - everything else like opening files and programmes, startup and shutdown, all seem pretty normal. and it only got slow after SP2. i'm probably repeating myself, just trying to give as much information as possible so you don't have to ask me loads of stuff before you know what to advise, heh

A possible problem could be your firewall. I'd recommend enabling the Windows XP firewall and then uninstalling your McAfee firewall to see if this makes a difference. If this isn't the problem, then you can always reinstall. Installing SP2 may have caused the firewall some problems.