This is a joke, right?

Surely it would be better for the IT Department to actually look into how the P2P network was connecting?

Shouldn't there big a big giant firewall in place which blocks this type of thing?

Most users wouldn't know how to set up applications to use their company proxy servers and even if they did use the proxy server, surely the proxy should've been configured to only allow HTTP/HTTPS/FTP traffic through?

This is an IT failure - at our work we have a few people who've tried to install P2P software and it just gets nowhere for the aforementioned reasons. It also creates a few minor hassles with registering apps like Adobe Acrobat, but they're happy once you point them to your proxy