In the past I've been a heavy user of utorrent and peer guardian. Please forgive me. Now that I'm into a real OS, I guess I still have some window of concern. Do I need to run the ipblock program in addition to the ipfilter plugin?

Working on trusting linux and closing the gates.

Nope, you can rely on the ip-filter plugin. But do buy a good router with firewall. (such as an linksys wrt54GL with an edditional http://dd-wrt.com firmware in it)

Huge dif in performance of GL and G? other than price? If so I'll do it tomorrow.

Currently have Linksys WRT54G courtesy of brother who works for Cisco. Was he being cheap or it is suitable for downloading? I

The GL version comes with linux firmware installed by default, that is why i have bought it, but there is a wikipedia page on this which might be interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrt-54g