I'm not here to defend the downloader. It obviously has a lot of issues. However, those of you who always show 0 remote connections even after the downloader has been running for several minutes should definitely try forwarding ports if you haven't done so yet. (Others in this thread have explained which ports, etc.) On my old modem it shortened my patch download time from a few hours down to a few minutes. Things usually get much faster when remote connections start to show up.

Again, it's apparent from the posts on this forum that forwarding ports isn't doing the trick for everyone, but it's most definitely worth trying.