After I botched the upgrade to rc3 of xbian I did a fresh install of it and decided to try transmission. Mainly because it has an xbian /Xbmc plug in to see how the downloads are doing.

So far with rc3 the network has been much more stable, it's stayed up for 12 hours now without me having to reset the wifi and transmission has downloaded 4 hd TV episodes, previously with rc2 and deluged I'd be lucky to get one episode over night. Also the xbian plug in can pause it while watching videos, I'm not sure how well the Pi would cope playing hd from the USB hard drive while downloading at 300k/s.

Oh, but I can't seem to get into the xbian config page in rc3, it fails at 25% when trying to load it. Guess that's next on my fix list.