Fubar

There are two things that jump out at me about your problem:

1) You could have a firewall problem, as you only use the windows firewall you should temporarily turn it off. That will definitely show whether your firewall is the culprit.

2) Orange, your ISP, if it is anything like Orange UK then they have probably started "bandwidth shaping" (aka. P2P throttling), i.e. it will allow normal browser traffic to come and go freely while throttling back on P2P internet traffic.

If your firewall is not the problem then I would suggest you try talking to someone technical at your ISP. On the whole, ISPs do not like to admit that they are restricting P2P traffic, they do not even tell their own help desk/customer services but their technical people will know.

However, if your firewall is the problem then you should leave it off permanently and download and use a (free) firewall like ZoneAlarm.



UK Bob