As soon as I switched from 2.8.5 to 2.7.13, a bunch of uploads resumed and at "normal" percent-complete. So, it appears that 2.8.x is not reporting the correct percentage. Apparently, it's only reporting the percent due to the current chunk being uploaded. The exceptions are probably due to clients that aren't using chunks. In any case, I was satisfied that people really were getting complete uploads so I'm now running 2.8.6.

re the Dropped packets, I think that LW 2.8.x is displaying long-term statistics whereas the previous versions only show short-term. So there really is a problem with dropped packets on Gnutella! I've also noticed that the native-Win32 apps (e.g. Bearshare) seem to have a much lower percentage of dropped so maybe it's a Java issue?