Well, the thing I discovered yesterday was I think I am just having a run of bad luck with my tests, and that maybe everything is fine (except xchat)...
Since mIRC works through wine, that would mean whatever my irc server issues are program related, not connection since its' going through the network established in linux.
As for the urpmi sites I tried to go on to, I tried ireland, and it pinged fine, added those, and now my repositories are setup just fine (this was one of my original tests to try the connection; the repositories I used to have just didn't work, so I was worried my internet connection settings weren't right)...
Bittorrent, the mandriva torrent did not work, but I grabbed linspire and knoppix, and they started to immediately download... so that would mean I just had some bad torrents for my original test, right?
I will try your ktorrent idea and see what that does... the torrents I have been having trouble with always say the the torrent tracker timed out...
I will also try a different linux irc client, and see what that does for me.
Thanks for everyone's help so far... and if anyone has any more suggestions, keep 'em coming.... I still don't know why shutting down ipv6 didn't allow firefox to work (though I disabled ipv6 IN firefox to make firefox work)...
This post has been edited by krisbee2000: 31 August 2007 - 01:50 PM