Oh yes it did (well sort of)!
Touche, Bob.
I just checked my 1st post, and I appear to have said that i downloaded a "1gb" file, when I meant 1GB; my aged finger on the shift key caused that, as I knew which file I repeatedly downloaded - the finger worked properly on the second post though, and the third. Humble apologies to all.

On a serious note though, I have updated various Microsoft "fixes", run Combofix and updated the dotnetfx to 3.5. Things seem a bit better, and watching the TBBmeter it seems as though my speeds on the "1GB" download vary between 9 & 32 - which seems fine to me. It doesn't, however, address the fact that when I watch the meter whilst using iPlayer it runs in fits and starts and peaks at about 9 Mbps - spending most of its time hunting, with very little actual download: as I say, it appears to be in real-time or less. This was really my main query, as we use iPlayer a lot.
Again, any help graciously received.
Cheers, Les.

Hi again, Bob,
Just a little snippet. As per RobFlet's suggestion, I tried the BT Beta tester a few times and my speeds varied between 6Mbps & 9Mbps, this whilst the TBB meter showed between 12 & 30.
Checking via TBB meter - whilst downloading various, random files - I never seem to get, for more that a second or two, the 30-35 MHC says I should. Is that just a glitch of the system or something else? Cheers, Les

There is a good reason that iPlayer runs in fits and starts rather than a constant rate.

The buffering it uses fills up, so it stops sending data, when that has got down to a certain number of spare seconds left, then it will grab another burst.

If watching a LIVE as opposed to recorded stream the behaviour will resember more what you expect.

In reply to a post by lelboy:

XP SP2

Is that the 32-bit or 64-bit version?

If 32-bit you should install SP3 and all subsequent security updates, SP2 stopped receiving security updates a long time ago.

Have you tweaked your TCP settings at all? XP can benefit from optimising them, have a look at http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php

I've not used Applian but I do use the free Get_iPlayer, it will downlaod streams as fast as the beeb will let you have them, for SD TV that's about 22Mbps and for HD TV that's about 11Mbps (why they throttle HD more than SD I don't know). You can run several instances at the same time if you need to download more than one program and that will saturate your connection.

TTB test files are up and down for me, I can get a steady 37.5Mbps from the microsoft site. Like the SP3 install file for example.