I have the same problem, and while I have a vague idea
why, I can't really do anything about it.
Here is what I suggest
grab a traceroute prog if you don't already have one
with your os, run a trace to carrionfields.
I recently have piles of dead threads, and packets
just go off into cyber-space somewhere and poof.
The only way I pulled off a half-arsed solution
was to have a dos window open pinging another site
'near-by' I lose a chunck of speed off my lil 56k
connect, but when the pings (on another monitor so
I'm seeing them) go into the 1200+ or time out
I just wait a bit and the pings 'find' thier way
through it is usually 2,4, or 5 timeouts and then
it is going again for a while. I just figure someone
inbetween me and cf has some funky stuff in a name server
'course It might be my isp, need to trace a bunch of other
sites and see if I get the same garbage.
Been real busy at work, so by the time I poke in here
I just want to play instead of check other sites
I'll get around to it someday though.
Lemme know if your trace is clean or had odd stuff in it
so I won't start getting paranoid that it is all me and
me alone.