Peer and kB/s speed issues

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I was told to repost this in troubleshooting, so here goes.

I have utorrent v. 1.8.1, and I've been having some major difficulties. The first couple of torrents downloaded successfully, though their kB/s speed was erratic and ranged wildly from 2 kB/s to 75 kB/s.

Then I downloaded a torrent that ran at around 70 kB/s for 20 min, and then crashed to 0.1 kB/s (to make sure, I let it sit for about 5 hours after it crashed to see if it would recover). I eventually figured out that if I stopped the torrent, exited utorrent, restarted the computer, and then started the torrent back up, it would run at a healthy 70 - 120 kB/s for 20 - 30 min before crashing again, and I'd have to repeat the restart process.

I thought this might be a problem with the settings, so I made some adjustments here and there, including adjusting the bandwidth settings according to the speed chart guide posted somewhere on here. My torrents now download steadily (i.e. they dont crash down to .1 kB/s), however they run at a consistent 2 - 4 kB/s, and spike above that (to about 10 or 11 kB/s) once or twice every 15 minutes. It still seems like it might be a settings problem, but I'm not sure what to do at this point.

One other thing I've noticed that I am assuming is related. Usually, I am connected to either 1 peer or 0 peers, and any downloading speed spikes occur when this changes to being connected to 2 peers for about 10 seconds. The latest download, which is a 1.3 GB file, shows 0(615) under the peer column. I'm relatively new to using utorrent, so I don't know what this actually means, but I've been assuming it means something along the lines of out of 615 available peers, I am connected to none of them (let me know if I'm wrong).

Anyway, since speed seems to pick up when I randomly connect to more peers, my main question is: how can I do this? Is there any way I can facilitate connecting to more than 0 peers or 1 peer? Or, is my problem not related to peer connection at all?

If anybody has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks

[moogly]

Do you know if your ISP is not hostile to p2p ?