I addresssed everyone here with a plural "you". Perhaps I should have been more concise and applied more broadly by saying "you guys".

1.7 is not detrimental to the network. So feel free to use it.
:-)
There are some ugly bugs in UltraPeers, and hopefully, these will be fixed sometime soon.

I'm fairly sure the developers are aware of the situation. I only hope that they are figuring out what is causing the poor performance.

BTW, I tried out 2.1.0, and I was getting EXCELLENT results. They were equally comaparable to 1.7c. But that's just me on dial-up. I don't know how it is working out for others yet.
:-)

Greets,