Zero availability on torrents for Vuze and Utorrent, what's causing this?

Yes you are a noob but it's not a simple answer you are looking for and could be many things. I can say it's fair to rule out that you are trying to download dead torrents because you would mention "some" working so I would lean toward your ISP may have found a way to block p2p and I think Comcast was recently sued in court over this and lost. The other is your router's hard firewall is blocking your client's port. You should first try to port forward the port your client (ie. uTorrent) is using under preferences and porbably the cause. You might also want to turn off the routers firewall altogether because it blocks too many ports and rely only on your soft firewall (ie. Windows). ALso add your client to exceptions under your soft firewall. If all of that doesn't work then I would try using a different port for your client and port forward