bigfish, I am guessing that you and your wife are sharing a broadband connection. I have no idea if that is contributing to some of your issues. I have multiple computers with a wireless network. I haven't as yet run two of them on WGT. I will do this today to see if it has any effect on my speed or anything else for that matter.
All of my PCs are XPsp3, IE8 beta, and flash 10. Currently I experience very few problems so I should be able to tell if sharing a connection has any effect on game performance.
If you aren't sharing a connection then I don't suppose this will help you in any way. But it will be a good comparison test regardless. I hope it will help.
Glhad