I don't really have any problems using the public sites for the downloads like Lost - I've found in the past that mininova has the Lost torrent first although the EZTV site is the original place for them, never really looked. Demonoid seems to be a bit slower to get them up than places like Mininova. The more people there are on a tracker though, the slower things will go generally, that's why it pays to get in early with a fast connection or wait until the number of peers and seeds shifts to more seeds than peers/leeches.

Cheers,

Andy

P.S. Got my broadband upgraded last week so I'm now running between 5 and 8 Mbit connection with 448k upload