Internet slow on Mac side of boot camp, but Windows browser fast ??

After installing Windows Vista and running both OSX Leopard and Vista I started noticing a slow down from my Firefox and Safari both. Up until now I have had really good speed and great browsing and torrent downloads using Transmission,,I switched over to Vista and it was fast so I thought "what the heck is going on here",,checked out the forums for some advice on different DNS etc, tried all of those with no results so finally called my ISP and they ran a traceroute with me from utilities and the first ping was coming back that I was behind a firewall,,,Checked the Mac's firewall and turned it off still no luck, made sure Little Snitch was off, still nothing..Thought how is this possible..ISP(Time Warner Cable-Roadrunner) advised me to take the cable modem back and switch it out for a new one because they said my speeds were definitely not right..well I decided to check my Vista and sure enough the windows firewall was on,restarted my iMac and used traceroute again from network utilities and the firewall was gone....So some how even though I was running Leopard only at that time still with bootcamp somehow the firewall in Windows was bleeding over into OSX..I'm not a computer engineer but I thought they (Vista/OSX Leopard) were running independently from each other in bootcamp...Just wanted to let you guys out there know about this because it seems that some of the quirky issues that you can't find answers to might be attributed to this..