Wireless Connection Slowdown

While I was downloading a file earlier, I clicked on the Airport icon in the menu bar to see which wireless network I was connected to. As Airport scanned for wireless networks (it does it automatically after clicking the Airport icon), I noticed that the speed of the download dropped so far that it practically stopped for a moment. I tried it a few other times and got a similar result. Anyone else notice connection drops/slowdowns when clicking on the Airport icon while it scans for other networks? Is there a way to prevent this? I'm running OS X 10.6.2 on a MacBook Pro. I posted it here because it seemed more of an OS thing than hardware.