I've been suffering from exactly the same problem for several weeks; internet connection seems down, but you can make pings to pages. And amule is connected to a server, but it doesn't download anything. It seems like amule collapses the tcp/ip sockets or something like this. In my case, I have a router and 3 computers, and I'm using amuled daemon from amulecvs deb package. And when you turn off amule, the connection turn back normal again.