I am curious if port 4449 is common among people who choose to use skype
or other internet phone services? The reason I ask is that the connection
I have seems to drop or slow greatly when someone from skype logs on but
is affected very little by people who are torrenting or downloading.

Any info on this would be helpful if anyone knows?

by default skype will use port 80. And that in itself is quite anoying if you are developing webpages =)

If port 80 is taken it will go to 443.

There is a setting for this under Advance settings -> connection.