VPN - Are they effective, which ones are best, how to best set them up

Nah, NordVPN provides free proxies as part of their subscription. Thanks anyway.

 

Nord's VPN client "kill switch" solution is a pretty poor one. It actually closes/kills the P2P app instead of denying it access to the internet if the VPN tunnel fails for whatever reason. This sucks because when the VPN comes back the P2P app is no longer running. And it also doesn't address the issue of the P2P app startiing before the VPN client starts and establishes its tunnel thus leaving the P2P connections exposing your actual/real IP!

Also, forcing the app to close like that creates other problems such as causing a rehashing of files the next time the P2P app is opened or restarted.

The best way of implementing a "kill switch" is to simply bind the P2P app to the VPN connection's adaptor. This works with any VPN service, any VPN client (even Nord's), and any VPN protocol (yes, even "NordLynx"). This means you can set the P2P app to only download while connected to a VPN. If the connection to the VPN drops or you disconnect or the VPN client hasn't yet started, the downloads stop and don't start again until there is VPN connection. This prevents any torrent traffic, for example, from traveling over your default IP address, linking your real IP to your downloads. And best of all the P2P app stays running.

And as far as I can tell all the P2P apps have an option for binding to an adaptor -- uTorrent, qBittorrent, eMule, etc. Some such as qBittorrent are better suited because you can bind to the actual VPN adaptor's name rather than the VPN adaptor's local IP, which can change with each new VPN tunnel or connection.

Here's an example how to do it with qBittorrent:

Configure qBittorrent to block transfers on VPN disconnect​