[U2Lynne]

You don't appear to be firewalled, so that is good. It could just be that you are on a torrent that doesn't have a lot of seeders and so the speed isn't very high yet.

As for utorrent and the internet activity being slow, you can cap your upload and/or download speeds so that it still allows you to surf the web. My max upload is about 52, so during the day (when the kids and hubby are also online), I cap it at about 30 and don't do any downloading. If I'm downloading also, then I cap my upload at 20 and my downloads at 100 (max for downloading is about 300) and usually no one notices that I'm still running bittorrent.