LinuxQuestions.org - Linksys BEFSR41 v2

Might not even be the trouble here, surfing & opening of pages speeds are close to dialup.

ISP: Joink.com (only pony in town) supposed to have 256K
wireless to house, wired to modem inside

connected to router linksys befsr41 v2 (firmware updated last year to 1.46.02
we just plugged the pc's in and started surfing, no setting or configuring of anything

3 PC's:
win XP
my new 5.0
my old 4.5

ALL pc's surf like they are on dial up - take the router out of the loop, and surfing resumes to lightening........

here's my ifconfig:

ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:14:2A:4D:DE:36
inet addr:192.168.1.101 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::214:2aff:fe4d:de36/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:116763 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:76138 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:39364860 (37.5 MiB) TX bytes:9749998 (9.2 MiB)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0xe800

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:250 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:250 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:18615 (18.1 KiB) TX bytes:18615 (18.1 KiB)

I have been on the phone with the ISP and with linksys, trying to troubleshoot, but nothing so far has worked.

on the live chat........after some difficulty finally got a file to downgrade the firmware to 1.44.2 but it never "took"
speed tests were crazy like 34/238 on the 4.5 and 40/320 on the 5.0 - didn't run one on the xp machine, cause that was what I was talking to the linksys support with and didn't want to risk loosing the chat........

Right now, better half is buying a Linksys Network Everywhere NR401 router to try...
in a few posts I've been reading, there is some confirguring to do within the routers and the PC's to all work together - and just how does this all work?
Need I say the word NEWBIE?
:)