LODR is right that with proxies maybe.... But you should call your ISP, they are the cause of your problems. You will have a hard time before they tell you they do that (if the stupid tech support even knows about it) but if you are patient, a knowlegful person can probably leave you out of the Gnutella block. Of course, you can always switch ISP to not support stupid practices
The differences between Gnutella ans Ares is that Ares has far less content. There is also the ED2K network, it is very slow, but is unmatched for the amount and the quality of content.
Ciao