Smoketoomuch unhappy. "Help I can't connect" situation.

[Smoketoomuch]

When I first got online in september,p2p programs, but more generally direct connections were blocked. Not specific ports, since none of p2p at that time (MyNapster, Limewire, Morpheus, WinMx) worked - except for a few days each months when the proxy was down (for maintanance?). Then beginning from october, they changed the setting of thiere server, and everything worked fine. Now they did it again. I thought there is network problem, since I could not even browse, then tried out browsers with use proxy setting - and it works. I switched that option off since they slowed down Smoketoomuch browsing experience - but now I'm in same situation: nothing p2p works, and I tried everything, even to route the donkey trough port 80.

I can't change ISP, I'm connecting from my room in the dorms. So it seems that's it. Bahbye peertopeer, R.I.P. for me.

Http tunneling is bullcake - even if it works, is slow, but problem is, it doesn't work. Any ideas what can I do? I connect trough LAN to the server, I'm technically challenged, so this means I'm not sure about that proxy business, I'm only sure about the correllation between p2p not working and having to enter values (or check in IE) to use proxy in my browser. When browser works without it S2M is happy, since p2p works also. When not, p2p not either, consequently S2M is

I'll try to speek to someone in the church (well, the server is located below a church that is used as library and study rooms), but I'm sure they would not say: sorry, we'll change everything back, please forgive us the inconvenience.

Why I write this? If I can't connect, at least I'm curious (in layman's terms please) how they do that. Usually I see answers to "help cant connect" questions as ISP blocking certain ports. This is not the case here. So what is it then? And the best for last: how can I circumvent it?

Ok, see you later

[zombywoof]

If proxies and http don't work and all else fails, what about downloading via ftp?