My Torrents Will Not Download

[riffola]

I have been using Utorrent for about 6 months now and never had a problem until last week. Now whenever I select a torrent to download it pulls through as normal and starts to download with the blue symbol beside it, however after a few seconds this turns red and the best speed I get is 0.1kpbs. This is the same for all torrents i select.

I am running Windows Vista and Utorrent 1.7.5. I have allowed the connection through windows firewall and my port says it is forwarded correctly. I am showing 294 nodes (whatever that is!) and my torrents show seeders are available. In one case I have seeds 3(8), peers 14(329), however no download speed or eta.

Can anyone help?

[Switeck]

Tiscali ISP has become very hostile towards BitTorrent traffic, throttling it extremely low.

[riffola]

How did you know I was using Tiscali?! Is there any way to get around this, or is it a case of changing my ISP? If so, who is the better ones to look at where downloading BitTorrent traffic would be easier and faster?

[kjc]

I'm not sure if this will work, as user-agent blocking is not enabled at the time of writing, but try this:

Use Privoxy's (google for it) hide-user-agent option to enable communication via HTTP with the trackers. Note that this may get you banned from some trackers. I'm only using it on one I'm friends with the admin of.

Preferences->Bittorrent. Set Protocol Encryption to "Forced", and tick "Allow incoming legacy connections."

In the "Connection" section, set the "Port used for incoming connections" to 22 (SSH).

This might completely fail when they decide to turn on their user-agent (and other?) blocking.