Bingo, found out where my problem is, courtesy of some indepth tracing and irksome research.
My connection hops from Brisbane to Sydney, onto the REACH network to go to HK then to US. Soon as it gets on the REACH network, packet loss jumps to 25-100% and ping goes from 2 digit numbers to 200-500.
Dammit.
Not much I can do about that, I guess.
No other Aussies have this? I'm surprised. Damn you, Drago. And Bigpond. And Reach. And the Internet.

I use bigpond too *grin*

Nope, I use iinet and everything goes via their Sydney servers then over to the US. Very occasionally the international connection or the DNS server falls over but that's about the only problem I've had.

Thank you people, I don't have the faintest idea how I got a serious concussion and obviously its giving amnesia. Really wierd since I havent gotten into any fights at all. But thanks for the help everyone now I can finally and hopefully enjoy Lusternia again.