wow, thanks for the fast help, this is the first time I've ever posted anything and the quick response was unexpected! I tried bitzi, my windows firewall has been off the whole time, and I even turned off my norton firewall. I have a lot of experience fishing through search results for bad files, and ALL of them don't work, even when I attempt to download every single search result (as a test), I get the same problem. I did get one or two files to work, but they take hours for a file that used to take less than a minute even though there are a lot of hosts for it. hmmmmmm