[Carriage Hill]

Check your download/upload speeds, and compare to others:
http://www.speedtest.net/

Use this to test the PC for adaware/malware:
http://www.malwarebytes.org/

[Zionist Conspirator]

I tried to download the anti-malware tool and it wouldn’t load, so it may be that I do indeed have malware that is blocking the download. Or it could just be my slow connection. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell.

[Zionist Conspirator]

If you want to know how crazy things are, get this: on my second try the anti-malware tool downloaded in a matter of seconds.

After a scan it found one piece of "unwanted non-malware"--pup.opencandy in my AIM downloader, which was successfully quarantined.

Oh well. At least one more possibility has been eliminated. What now?