Ask your mate to try tuning his Azureus. Install the IRC plugin and go to the support forum. I must say that it took my mate, an Azureus user on a Mac, three sessions of a couple of hours each to get things tuned and ship shape and at the same time understand what he'd done.
My mate doesn't know whether that is something to do with Azureus or BitTorrent in general.
I use transmission, it's very basic but it works. I first thought if I made the upload rate low I would download quicker, but I was wrong, I put the upload at 40 and my download went from 10 to 60!!!
I had someone tell me (and the whole message board) that the goverment tracks what you download and if you download too much you go to jail, made me
Agreed Bittorrent is soooooooooooo 5 years ago, its all usenet now, baby!!
Not used Giganews, I use Easynews, or newzbin.com. You have to pay but you'll use all your download bandwidth, and if you stick a download manager in there like Reget my mate can get an entire episode of Lost down in 6 minutes.
Bit torrent is technically an algorithm not a program. It functions by downloading random chunks of a file while at the same time uploading random chunks to others. Unless everybody else is "seeding" a file (meaning has 100% of it and is sharing it), you are almost always uploading parts of the file you are downloading. Effectively, the algorithm works by rewarding uploading client applications by offering more download connections.
There are dozens of bit torrent applications out there. Your Bit Torrent application may or may not allow you to remove the "seed" feature once you have finished downloading 100% of your file. If it doesn't I recommend you find one that does. This bypasses and legal issues, for the most part, because even though you have uploaded random parts of some unknown file, you never had the complete file during this time and never were aware of the contents. Don't feel bad about not seeding either, because torrenting can work fine even if theres not a single seed out there (presuming all the clients as a whole has at least 1 full copy spread among them).
I believe the only people either prosecuted or given cease-and-desist orders are heavy seeders. Leechers are harder to track in some ways (think dynamic IPs, lower volumes of traffic, etc)
Just a note that if your firewall/router box tends to crash when using a bittorrent client, try turning "upnp" support in your client preferences to "off". This solved my friend's problem with her linksys router, which would crash every couple of hours if azereus was running.
(Though it does mean she has to be savvy enough to set up port redirection manually.)