how many seeds vs leachers are there? What ISP do you use? What torrent client are you using? Do you use a router? if so, did you setup port forwarding?
also, even when you change some settings to speed up your d/ls, chances are that your not going to see an improvement right away (give it an hour or two). But you should deffinitly be seeing speeds over 1kbs (although, when I had DSL I got some pretty crappy torrent speeds for some reason)