Thats great Sean, most things wrong with a computer are something we all go 'silly huh' at.. so glad thats ok..
I cant say i exactly trust your friend at adelphia about the throttles or blocking but its not that person per say, but the company.. they make it policy not to admit this to most folks that ask.. which makes it seem even more of a con then anything I think,,the lies..
But giving adelphia the benefit of the doubt, there is not alot you can do to increase your download speeds really. Its completely dependent on the other users your receiving from. Most users, infact all that I know of their upload speeds are much slower then their download speeds.. which means you can only get as fast as they can give.
That said, you can try adjusting your Allocated Bandwidth, you'll find it in WinMx Peer Network section of Settings. Increase this to about 10 kb/s Out and see if it helps some, dont go past that number because you will only slow yourself not get faster, this increases your resources your giving to the network also but can increase your speeds to a certain point.
You can also limit your Outgoing Bandwidth, this sometimes will help divert some of your bandwidth to the task of downloading instead of uploads. You can find out more about what number to limit that at here:
https://www.winmxworld.com/scripts/bandwidth/This is a script that tests your bandwidth, so its best to visit this page with everything except WinMx and the page off. Then follow the directions it gives you for setting your limits.
Let me know if this helps you.