[Hampshire] ISPs (again): Recommendation and warning

Hi all

Two quick things - both related:

1) I want a largely bog standard home ADSL 2Mb connection but I'm fed up of very polite but entirely clueless tech folks (see below) wasting my time with pointless instructions so, rightly or wrongly, I'm looking for an ISP with UK call centre tech support. I'm thinking of Zen - but didn't I hear (maybe on this list) recently that Zen are being taken over by someone so we can expect a drop in service standards? If so, what ISP would folks recommend for my pretty standard needs? I'm not into gaming or TV downloading - though an unlimited but fair use policy would be good. Apparently Zen give you emails telling you how close you are to your limit.

2) I'm leaving Orange as an ISP - in fact I never joined them, I joined Freeserve which became Wanadoo and now Orange. Just thought I'd mention why in case any of you ever consider them - and I'm well aware that they're probably only as bad as any other. However

/* rant on */
when you tell their tech folks that your connection's dropped out on two PCs (one Linux, one XP) both connected to the same router and they _insist_ on getting you to delete your XP temporary internet files before they'll do a line check (despite the router log saying LCP is down and no WAN IP address has been allocated), it gets a bit tiring not to say expensive.
/* rant off */

Ironically, Orange have one of the worst reputations around but I've had almost no trouble with them in two different locations. However there's nothing wrong with the bt line and (quelle surprise) they did an "upgrade" a few weeks back and the connection's been dodgy since then. Believe it or not, on one problem a few weeks back where most sites were working but the odd one not, I asked them to ping the site and they said they didn't have authority to do a ping!

Cheers
Rob