Check your connection speed. Maybe you are no longer connecting at 56K speeds due to a change in line quality. If you are connecting at 56K speeds which typically range from 44K-53K, you may well have spyware or a virus. I recently had a blaster worm infection on my computer which totally took over the internet connection. The worm cut my connection speeds in half while it shared out info on my computer. If you do not have anti-virus software, you could try housecall.trendmicro.com to check for viruses. If you find a virus you will need to search the web for how to remove it, or find a free antiviral program like avg antivirus or purchase an antivirus program. Virus or no virus, you could then you could use something like ad-aware from
www.lavasoft.de or spybot search and destroy from
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/ to check for and remove spyware from your computer.