I overlooked this when evaluating my speed problem

Yet another circumstance that can adversely affect your up and download rates: I realized only when it announced it was done that my Windows Updater had been downloading the whole time I was complaining how slow my download was. I was sure it wasn't due to me because just the other day I got a decent and expected rate. I figured it was that the 6 seeders and 13 peers were all rate-limited. Seemed rather unlikely, but nothing else satisfied. Until I saw the "Updates are ready..." announcement and remembered I'd turned that on a day or two before. Looking at the various active connections in netstat didn't inform me - svchost and rundll always have a number of open and active sockets. Maybe I'd have found it if I'd ananlyzed my traffic with a sniffer.

Now my rate is back where it typically is. Hope this helps someone.