Probably Obvious questions.

[Lancer]

Ok, so I'm new to all of this.

Can someone explain the difference between Seeds and Peers?

I know the more I have, the faster the downloading speed, so why do I only get 1 or 2 seeds out of 72 or 0 out of 127 peers?

Thanks. And if I missed my answer in one of the stickies I apologize.

[DreadWingKnight]

I know the more I have, the faster the downloading speed

Up to a certain point, but your description indicates a VERY poorly configured setup.

http://utorrent.com/setup_guide.php

[Ultima]

peer

A user/client connected to the swarm. People sometimes refer to peers as "leechers," though they also use the same word to refer to its more negative connotation. It's recommended that you use the word "leecher" to strictly refer to people who don't share so to keep the distinction clear and confusion to a minimum.

seed

A peer with 100% of the data in the torrent contents.

[Lancer]

Ok this is odd, while testing for speed, I halted my current torrent, and when I restarted it, but before i actually changed any speed options, it greatly increased.

I was at 1 seed and now am at 17. Any reason for this?

EDIT: I've now done this several times. It seems when I halt it, and then restart it, I get a really high DL speed for about 5 minutes. And then it slowly goes down to less than 1 kBps. Is this... normal?

[jewelisheaven]

That behaviour suggests interference from automated means either on your ISP or ISPs of clients connected to yours. Have you made sure you're setup correctly and tried Ctrl-P-> BitTorrent -> Enable/Forced encryption?

[Lancer]

Hmm, it was disabled, I enabled it, what will this change and why (if anyone feels like explaining)?

[GTHK]

The connections are encrypted to try and prevent ISP's from interfering with your torrenting.

[jewelisheaven]

What GTHK said. Data are encrypted to keep OVERT attacks against interfering with your connections. There are still methods out there to identify traffic as bittorrent traffic, including if you're running say 400 connected peers at once, and making 40 connection attempts per second, as well as having DHT enabled. Also deep packet inspection technologies (DPI for short) allow looking into your packets to find out that they are bittorrent protocol but as-is it looks like any other encrypted traffic, like SSL or PGP.

But the long and short of it is if you have troubles without encryption, try it. If with it on nothing changes, and you're still seeing troubles you can check out Ultima's How-To for Troubleshooting post #2 for more steps.