Different users seem to have different connection speeds

Hello
I recently made this computer and installed suse linux 11.2, it’s using a foxconn blackops motherboard with sonar audio card,
Intel(R) Core™2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz overclocked 5%.
Nvidia GeForce 7300 GS
4GB DDR3 RAM
1TB HDD
and most importantly a edimax wireless card using the RT61 chip

At the current time of writing i’m connecting to tiscali broadband, and the connection itself does seem very slow, but for me it can cope with simple internet tasks, almost instantaneous loading of webpages, uploading email attatchments, downloading email attatchments, send mail etc.
However, for my dad on a different user, it struggles to load hotmail, and if it does it does seem to take a very long time to open, send/reply to and open attatchments from emails, as well as adding contacts etc. I’ve checked the iwconfig and ifconfig outputs for both users and we’re definately connecting to the same access point with the same key and the same signal strength.
I’m currently connecting wirelessly through networkmanager but i did also try ifup to see if anything changed.
The two users are virtually the same exxcept for a few things, i have installed a different theme, i have a few more files and i’m also a member of the vboxusers group as i have a virtual machine from VBox running windows, purely for itunes. there is quite a lot of music and a few videos on the virtual machine.
As far as i can tell, there are no difference between the two users, yet the internet connection for my dad is quite a bit slower.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on or does suse just dislike my dad?

Thanks for your time
Mike