I have tried several times to download Music from the net, particularly from a site called 'Vuse'. The first few CDs I downloaded did so quite quickly but since than the time taken has been astronomical. For a CD album it says a total time of 20 hours to a few days. For a movie it say an infinite time. I have turned off my firewalls with little improvement. I ran a connection speed test which gave me the following results:

Download Speed: 1738kbps, Upload speed: 353kbps

Is this slow rate unusual, and is there anything I can do to improve it?

Thanks.

Your speed test indicates you have a 2Mps/512 kbps connection, running at around 80% of capacity.

Since Vuze is a bittorent client the problem can be many things. Very possible is that you are on a cheap "home" package with your ISP, in which case your ISP will throttle down the speed of those download programs, so to ensure that enough speed remains available for "normal" internet usage such as web browsing etc...

Other possibilities are wrong port forwarding (unlikely as it used to work faster according to your post), not enough seeders,...

Use rapidshare, even with the free side you should do it much quicker, PM me the album you want and i will give you the link