port forwarded but now I can't download or upload

[taiketsu]

The problem:

Before I attempted to set up port forwarding, I ran with the initial default settings on Utorrent and everything worked well. The only other change I made was using an ipfilter.dat file, which didn't affect download/upload speeds, significantly.

Now, when I try to download, many of my torrents will list 0 seeds and 0 peers, even though the torrent website lists many more seeders and leechers. There are some torrents with seeds and peers listed, but I'm connecting to none of them. Nothing is uploading, either.

What I changed before the problem:

I attempted set up port forwarding using the following instructions:

http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/Dlink/DIR-655/Utorrent.htm

I followed the instructions EXACTLY, except I was not able to perform the part about assigning a static address to my computer. because "network connections" menu lacks an "advanced" tab. I do not know how to fix this either. However, when I check my computer's ip, it consistently stays at 192.168.0.197 unless I reboot my router.

I have:

WinXP sp3

Windows Firewall

Dlink DIR655 Router

Utorrent 1.8.1

My attempts at troubleshooting include:

Removing the ipfilter.dat

Changing the listening port from 42881 to other port numbers

Removing the port forwarding settings I applied in my router's gui

Restoring utorrent to its' default settings by deleting the settings.dat

Turning off the Dlink firewall

Running the utorrent speed guide port forwarding test, only to be informed my port isn't correctly forwarded despite restoring default settings.

Please, can somebody help? I've tried looking through the other posts to look for other solutions but they didn't do the job. Thanks.