My friend who works there said summin bout tht "they prob wont go to that extremes the are a bunch of cowboys most of the time" lol manx telecom is a bit behind in the times when it comes to connection speeds n' stuff i think, they are only beginning to bring the island up to 2meg in the main towns.

i have noticed in the past the the dowload speed does tend to accerate at about 5-8pm to about 25kb/s and then slow down but i thought that prob was due to the amount of peers that are online

I couldn't say for sure, I would've thought that 5-8pm is still peak time.
Anyway, see how you go with it all... hopefully you won't lose your port any more & your speeds will be ok!

ARGH the wall has came back on the limewire globe! i havent changed anything since!

It sounds to me like you may have 2 problems. The 1st one is an unreliable UPnP built into your router. Not all brands of routers use the same UPnP technology & some are unreliable. That's why I was hinting at port forwarding before. But that's up to you.

Well I'm an idiot, LOTR I didn't even see your post.
"I have configured the router to the ports in LW" I read as port forwarding
(my 4.11.1 port changed last week with p/f in place)

... slinks off quietly.....

I have looked into that before and i dont want to mess up the network setup, cuz me dad takes his clients computers home to work on and we cant afford a virus infecting them, is it safe to port forward or should i just stick to slow downloads?

The difference between UPnP & PF is UPnP within the device opens whichever ports the UPnP capable program asks for. Whereas Port forwarding, you specify a particular port which is used all the time. It tends to be more reliable than UPnP. The other difference is you need to set up a static ip but that's nothing special. If you want instructions we'd need to know the specific model you're using. Port forwarding will only work with a single port per computer per program. So other computers on the network wouldn't be able to use the same port.

Oh Birdy ... that's never happened to me with PF. It's always remained the same listening port.

its a 3com 11g router i am not sure of the exact model number, i will have a bash at configuring it, hopefully this will work!

thanks for your help lotr!

Unless you have instructions in a manual or 3com web site, you can find some here http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm