Well, here's what I don't get: if the program, through the "publish" button, is supposed to synchronize and only upload the CHANGES, then why do I see every aspect of the shopping cart uploading......... which is why it took so long? My changes were deleting 2 items from one category, and I added a new category with those 2 items in it. Shouldn't the program have only changed (uploaded) those 2 effected categories?? If that is correct, it shouldn't have taken 49 minutes, even if I were on dial-up!! Right??

Well here's the thing on the updates you do.

When you delete a product it deletes all aspects of that product piece by piece. Same if you change a product such as you change the graphics for a product it will delete all the graphics that "were" associated with that product prior to the changes, and then it will upload the new changed graphics, "AND" it will resize, rename, etc. each graphic to associate it with it's own setup. Would be really nice if it just overwrote them and saved some time, but it isn't setup that way. So you'll see a lot of changes taking place if you've done graphic changes at all.
If you add items, same thing, it has to upload each graphic, "AND" it will resize, rename, etc. each graphic same as the changed graphics setup.

It's a lot of changes going on for any graphical changes to your shop. Textual should upload quite quickly though once the graphical stuff has already been done. I'm going to assume you are making a lot of change graphic wise and that may be what is causing it to upload so many things each time, but.....

None of this has anything to do with the speed that's really horribly slow for you, that's definitely not a SCC problem unfortunately for you