ftp problems R4.8

[Graham North]

Help!   I am a newbie who has set up a command line system on an XPI 166 laptop.  If I am posting this to a wrong please then please forgive the error and tell me where to post.

Most things seem to work okay except the ftp - I have been struggling with this on and off for a couple of weeks.   To download some packages I ended up running ncftp and it was able to successfully operate but excruciatingly slowly (ie 950secs) for a download of about 1MB - I operate on ADSL - go figure.

Both the regular and nc ftp packages seem prone to stalling.   My latest problems centre about trying to download some webpage files from another machine (WinXP) attached to (and behind) a USR router/firewall (yes the USRobotics firewall is enabled) my Freebsd one is not.   The ftp server is filezilla server on the WinXP machine.  I was starting with downloading a simple webpage to test apache - two files, index.htm and a small (30K) jpeg image.   Index file downloaded quickly, the jpeg stalled after 26K - and kept on stalling - same place.   When I tried using ncftp this time, it stalled at about 18K.  Things are set up well enough that I am able to connect to and navigate the server from my FreeBSD system.
Clearly there must be some basic setting that is incorrect or incompatible - perhaps related to my router - but am not too sure.
The only reference which I could find was related to problems with tcp.recvspace being set at 56K for 4.8, but it seemed to refer to modem related problems.   In any event I was not able to change it.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Graham/