Here's what I'd like to know.

Quad-core i7 950, 12 GB of RAM. I start the client up and it's working fine, not stalling.

5 minutes later, I turn on my wife's PC, an older Athlon II X4. She never had any "remote connections", 20 local. I have 34 remote, 26 local. I don't even know what that's supposed to mean anyway, it's a poorly-worded indicator. I assume remote is other users, local is SE-managed nodes, but I dunno.

Her PC has since finished the update, and my PC is just past 50%.

We're on the same connection, on the same switch even.

What's up with that?