Regarding the post below: The reason NetShade's proxies are slower now than they were 6 months ago has nothing to do with NetShade, but simply with the fact that anonymous proxy usage has become extremely popular in recent months, and many of the public proxy servers on the Internet are over-trafficked.

This page describes the situation in more detail:
http://www.raynersoftware.com/netshade/faq.php

Please note that the two major new features in this version, the NetShade Proxy and the Test Proxies feature were both developed specifically to address the performance issues. If you test the proxies after you launch the program, you'll have an up-to-date list of fast anonymous proxies. Or if you are a registered user you can just use the NetShade Proxy which is always fast.