Help sorely needed!

[The Masked Uni]

If anyone can resolve this problem, I'll consider them to be my personal saviour and be eternally grateful:

I have a well spec'd PC running XP SP2 and 8meg connection (wired).

Basically, I have that problem that everyone using SP2 has with the amount of open ports it allows, but I have downloaded and applied the eventID patch that is supposed to fix the problem, but I still cannot exeed download speed of around 20kbs. I'm convinced that it is not down to my ISP, as I used to use a PC running windows 98 with excellent connection speeds. I have disabled my firewall and also disabled automatic updates, as they set the number of conncurrently open ports back to 10 every time an update is applied (or so I've been told). It's pissing me off immesnsely - such a fat connection with such meagre speeds!

The problem persists regardless of how well seeded the torrent is (I generally use torrentspy), and regardless of the program I use (bit tornado, ABC and eMule have all been tried).
Am I missing something simple?
Any suggestions would be very gratefully received!

Thank you.

[Alien5]

have you tried http://www.portforward.com/help/pfprogression.htm

[The Masked Uni]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm not using a router.

[Alien5]

what firewall are you using?

[filephile]

it's possible that your isp is throttling your torrent speeds? I know you said you're convinced it's not your isp so only a suggestion.

you probably know already to have protocol encryption turned on.

[The Masked Uni]

Protocol encryption? Tell me more..!

[The Masked Uni]

what firewall are you using?

The one that comes with XP.

[Alien5]

Protocol encryption is in the prefences of your client.

get utorrent from http://www.utorrent.com/

click on Windows Firewall, on the Exceptions tab you have to add your client if it is not already listed.

If it is not listed then you go to Add Program then look in the list that appears, if the program is not there click Browse and then find the executable of the client in the new window that pops up. In this case it is utorrent-1.5-beta.exe

[The Masked Uni]

Thanks for everyone's help so far. I have installed uTorrent and have configured it as you said, but I'm still getting an average speed of about 10kbs on a torrent with 71 seeds and 71 peers!

What the fuck is wrong with this thing?!

[Alien5]

have you got a green tick at the bottom of utorrent?