Well as if by magic and after an hour and a half of massive packet loss it's all back to normal with zero packet loss !!
And no, I didn't reconfigure my firewall like the helpdesk told me to. There obviously was a problem and the powers that be have fixed it but the helpdesk are none the wiser and will totally frustrate the next sucker that calls them just like they did me.
Oh well, that's life I guess.
BTW, the helpdesk guy reckons that some packet loss is perfectly normal, yeah right !
I'd still be interested to know what tools he uses that can send and receive packets to my cable modem with no problems even when I can't get my packets through.
---------- Post added at 17:58 ---------- Previous post was at 17:41 ----------
Actually it's still not perfect but at least it's useable now (much smaller percentage of packets being lost now). It's not always showing up on the first hop either now :-

My ping times are very good, if only all the packets could make it through. Thinking about it, if it was congestion wouldn't my ping times be really erratic? The packets either get through really quickly or not at all.