As far as I am aware gladinet is the best (and only) way of mounting your Skydrive as a network drive .
In terms of speed; accessing something over the Internet like this is never fast, not even for payed solutions like iDisk (which I use). The only way to speed this up is to cache the entire drive loclly and have the files upload in the background which gives you fast access... but I don't think gladinet supports this.
You get what you pay for

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Oli