OK, im sure this one hasnt popped up before, ive got a computer on the internet via a cable modem, now in my machine i have a network card conecting to the internet and another network card i use to connect my computer to the internal LAN.
On the machine i am running the Windows 2000 Internet Connection Sharing to allow people to use my machine to access the internet.

Everyone following? :-)

ok, so it all works, its perfect, except when one of the other machines on the network, owned by a friend, starts downloading a file at full rate (600kbps), now there is only one other machine on the network, i want to be able to limit the speed of the internal network card to something like 100kbps to stop him in any way from using all of the bandwidth available on the cable modem.

Anybody know any software available to restrict the speed of a network card to this sort of speed?

I have looked for something like this in a software form (for W2K) and came up empty.

What you could do is get a NetScreen 5XP which has traffic shapping features. Also, it's a firewall so you get that added protection :) They are only about $450.00 and I have seen them on eBay (the older version 5a) for less than $350.00.

Hope this helps!

Let's take a look at your network....

Internet ---> Gateway Machine --> Hub/Swtich ---> Clients.

You can limit bandwidth at a variety of levels:
Client -- There may be client software that can be installed on the end users machine to limit bandwidth usage.

Hub/Switch -- Some more expensive hubs/switches have built in bandwidth management features.

Gateway Machine -- Use software to provide bandwidth throttling. Currently, I know of no windows software that provides this. Wingate and other network sharing utilities do not provide bandwidth throttling.

If you changed your network to:
Internet--->DSL/Cable Router --> Clients
Then you may be able to find a router that had bandwidth throttling.

I would expect these devices to be rather expensive -- much more so than punching the friend who is sucking up the bandwidth.