Does anyone know a program that truly limits connection limits? I've yet to find one. Vuze. ktorrent. utorrent via wine.

They all claim to limit connections, but it doesn't work. I've set all 3 to "50" connections - yet monitoring my router(dd wrt), I limit my total connections to 500. When I had this originally set to 300, it would frequently be at 270 with each torrent program up. Now it frequently chills around "460" (currently set @ 500) - even when only uploading 2 or 3 torrents. When I exit the torrent program, my total connections drop to less than 40.

Does anyone seriously know of a torrent program that actually limits connections? I know this may not be a problem to most of you, but I have a 8.1 wrt54g.. that has extremely low specs. It locks up when nearing connection limit..

Many thanks.

Try Transmission. It is a light weight torrent program and works very well. The default "maximum peers" can be changed to your liking. I have never seen it go past the configured settings. You can easily limit download and upload speed also. Transmission is actively maintained and has frequent updates.
Check your distro's package manager for a transmission package.