My DSL is lightning fast now and that without a miss or a sputter!
Hallelujah, Jesus!
I installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 and this totally brought about the results I was looking for.
Went to one hundred plus sites from Google (ten to a page)

and all loaded very, very fast except that two or three did not load at all. (The latter, of course, is to be expected). Apparently one or more files were corrupted and/or missing and/or there was some sort of conflict that the Service Pack resolved. Rebooted my machine and I was given the same stellar performance after surfing to numerous sites.
Thanks much to each one of you for your suggestions.