after speaking to talktalk technical (which was with a man whose english was not his first language and wasnt sure what p2p networking was and had to go ask his supervisior!!????) said that talktalk was aware that there was a problem with p2p and that they had received a larger amount of querys about it and that they were working on resolving this issue as soon as possible. (just hope its faster than putting my 2mb connection onto 8mb...9 months in and still no speedup yet!) they say they have put a note onto my account about the p2p and will see if they do anything about it.
hope this helps other talktalk users for now. if you have 1-3k downloads on talktalk its definately them and not a firewall issue as i first thought i had.