Eureka, I might have discovered a work-around to the painfully slow upload. It's not lighting-fast now, but significantly better. A simple setting in the iDrive application. Go to the application screen where your backup progress is shown. Reduce or minimize it. Note then there is an option for "bandwidth throttle". The default for "PC in Use" is low, maybe 20% or so. Crank it up as high as you feel comfortable with. I did 85%. Since it already had an "Auto Pause", I did not think this would have an effect on my normal usage. After I did this, my throughput jumped from about 12kBps - 20kBps up to over 200K to 400 kBps with an occasional 600 kBps. I can actually watch the files listed one by one as they are finally loading at a faster speed.
I suspect that the iDrive application's ability to determine real "PC in Use" is too sensitive to other things going on and always forces a throttle down. Which leads me to three conclusions about iDrive.
1) I've only used this product a few days and I found this work-around. iDrive tech support makes a living with this product and have been doing this for years. How could they not be posting this anywhere? As a new user, it seems to me, after finding this thread of messages with users asking for help, that the iDrive "moderator" responses have been anemic at best.
2) The second conclusion is that, if my work-around remedy is correct, the programmer who coded the "PC in Use" module of the application, the group/project manager and the QA engineer that approved it all owe us users an apology.
3) Third, my cable-modem download speed is a constant and verifiable 30 MBps. More importantly, my upload never drops below 5 Mbps. The robot-like response of the "moderator" is always "IDrive has been designed to use the maximum bandwidth available on your network at the time of backup operations". Oh yeah? 200kBps to even 600kBps is a far cry less than 5 MBps. Competitors report far better performance. iDrive should too.
To the credit of iDrive, I do like the design and interface. And I like the smartphone coverage as well as multiple computers on one account. If the incremental backups continue to work, I might stick around. On the other hand, because of what I had to go through, and because of other comments and the nearly total absence of problem-ownership or response on the part of iDrive, I'll continue to look for an alternate solution.