Paul's probably maxing out his connection anyway, so downloading it from his site via HTTP is very unlikely to go faster.

Unless your BitTorrent stuff is set up wrong. The more you upload, the more you download. You have to make sure your network is set up so that people can initiate remote connections to your computer or you'll never get any decent download speeds.

Azureus, the client I use, has a test feature to make sure that your network is set up properly. It's really just forwarding one port (for Azureus -- I think others may use up to about ten ports) to your computer if you have a firewall.

Also, I've never seen Torrents magically stop. Maybe you were being kicked somehow because you weren't sharing anything? Or maybe there was a bug in the client you were using. All in all, my experience with Torrents is that it's a start it and leave it process.