I'm on TimeWarner/RoadRunner and have had no trouble using bit torrent via Azureus now or at anytime in the last year.

Azureus does report that my upload speed is capped at about 40Kb/s, but I've never had my connection reset or any limit on download speed (I regularly top 200 or 300KB/s).

They are one and the same, and I've noticed that it crashes while i'm trying to download the latest ubuntu, and that's where the problems lie. While they might be able to justify blocking pirate traffic they can't distinguish and are shutting down legitimate downloads.

I don't seem to have any problems. I torrent for weeks and get tons of stuff off of newsgroups and not a single problem. Perhaps it is just different regional management? I do notice the upload bandwidth though at 50% upload, download speeds are halved by 50% but I don't think that its a huge problem.

Rogers does it here. But the law is different, and with the government we are stuck with (since the disloyal opposition was too chicken to vote non-confidence) tends to be pro-business and anti-consumer.

A pox upon thy house Stephen Harper.

Craig, that is expected behaviour. You need to cap upload speeds, since downloading data also uses upstream, you know, flow checks and CRC stuff.

If Spamcast acquired some social conscience and bothered to quell the gazillion hijacked bots on their network sending spam and hosting spam sites, they'd have plenty of bandwidth for all.

If you are using 100% of your upload bandwidth, your downloads will be affected, and that is normal. All tcp traffic (such as downloads) requires small acknowledgements and chatter in the other direction. If that stuff is delayed or lost, your downloads will decrease in speed so as to reduce that delay or loss. QOS enabled routers can be programmed to give priority to this type of thing so you maintain consistent speed by avoiding capacity crunches. ISPs do this too, to varying extents as well to provide decent ping rates.

I'm also a TWC customer. My experience comports with Craig's. Periodically, I've also been forced to shut my cable modem off after using P2P because my transfer rates would slow to a trickle (bps instead of kbps). Recently, however, I haven't had to do this so maybe TWC has refined their traffic shaping.
Yesterday, I noticed that I retain the same IP even after the cable mode and router have been unplugged for over four hours. I plan on testing this observation further. Is TWC now assigning static IPs to residential customers in order to help the RIAA and the bush regime?

They can definitely add TimeWarner to the list. 

My internet connection would invariably die within a couple hours of p2p use and a cable modem reset would be required to get it working again. So much for downloading torrents overnight.

However more recently I haven't been disconnected at all using p2p, so maybe they finally got their act together?

I also notice that my download speeds are severely crippled when I am using 100% of my upload bandwidth, but capping my upload speed in bittorrent to 85-90% of the nominal amount gives normal download rates.

...That most ISPs block port 25 relays to cut down on spam.

Seems that would fall under the same category as well.

Crag: Your first problem sounds like too many connections killing your modem/router. By nature, p2p involves connecting to lots of different clients. This can kill some cheap & not so cheap routers. Most p2p programs have max connection settings, which can help.

Secondly, using 100% of ul bandwidth will always kill dl transfers, as a certain amount of ul is needed to acknowledge packet receipt. Without this, you won't get as many packets because you cant tell the sender "Thanks, how about another one?"

using 100% of the upload speed will increase the latency of the data sent. this generates periods where no data is sent to reduce the latency again. (short version)

Yep, I use bit for downloading demos, fan subs, and other such legal purposes. When I have 50+ connections on one torrent, and it's speed varies between only 1 and 50k it kinda makes you wonder... I have a 10Mbps line that tests at 9.5 at speedtest.net, what the hell am I paying for this for if I can't use it???

P.S. YES I know how to work port forwarding.