[BBill]

As well, the homeowner who we bought off said that the connection was too strong (anyone ever heard of this?) so he had a filter or something? How would I go about installing one of these?

What he meant here is that the signal strength is to strong. This happend in my neighborhood as Comcast was adjusting for all of the new subscribers.
The filter he is talking about ia actually an "attenuator" I installed a 6db attenuator on my cable and it helped with the connection problems. Later on I took it out.
If that is the problem an attenuator is only a few bucks and radio shack should sell them I believe.