Looks to me like they have now fixed the problem, hooray.
My VNC access seems fast now and doesn't blow up, FTP not via IE is back to full speed to and I expect the quality of my game connection will be better when I try it tomorrow night.
I've removed the proxy workaround and all seems good.
It was still dodgy Tuesday night so was fixed Wednesday or today. So thats 6 weeks of very poor service - I'll call them tomorrow and see if they would like to offer me some money off as the latest bill has the tech support call on it grrrr
Thanks to everyone for badgering them to get this fixed and for everyone's constructive comments
EDIT Just did the speed test I'd previously used...zero packet loss from servers on all continents
