Slow modem connect speeds in Win 2000?!?

I have a USR External Courier V. Everything modem, and it worked great on my system with Win98, consistenly connecting around 49.3. I recently upgraded to ADSL, so I decided to give a friend of mine the modem. He was using a cheap internal Winmodem with Windows 2000 (Asus a7v MB) and usually connected around 50k, but online benchmarks showed it was rather slow. After hooking the modem up to his system, Win 2k automatically loaded the drivers and it was set to go. Unfortunately I can't get the thing to connect higher than 19.2. I've tried it with his ISP and mine, so its not the provider. And its not his phone line because his previous crapola modem connected higher than that. So does anyone know whats wrong? Is there something in 2k I am missing that could cause it to connect at <56k? I had to use a DB25-DB9 adapter to hook it to his com port, but I don't think that would matter. I even tried changing the com1 settings in Win2k to 115k/8/0/1/hardware to no avail. Now I DID leave the other modem in there and just disabled it, and he also has a network card, but again I can't imagine that slowing it down. Any info would be helpful. Thanks.