Are "they" mucking with my dl's of this TV show?
 

There's this popular scifi show that's been shown in the UK before being shown here in the US. I've been trying to download it.

I can find tons of sources, all four star, T1 or higher. I try to download them, they start out fast, then slow down, then very, very slowly approach 99%.

Then this little game starts. Waiting in line, position 1. Downloading from one host at 0K. Verifying file contents. Pause. Download goes back to 94%, LW immediately finds several hosts, and downloads at a good speed. Until it approaches 98 or 99%. Then it slows to a crawl. Waiting in line, position 1 (or, sometimes, position 4321). Finally, "verifying file contents." Goes back to 94% complete, lather, rinse, repeat pretty much indefinitely.

Occasionally, a file completely completes. I try to watch it and "file corrupted" or, "can't launch file due to problem with the program (Quicktime)."

So out of frustration, I switch to BitTorrent, DL the shows, exact same copies, same sizes & filenames, of these files mind you, and they play just fine.

So, is someone mucking with these shows on Gnutella? Or am I just paranoid?

So if "they" were mucking up the downloads, how would they go about doing it?

That Bitcollider looks really clever. Unfortunately, the OS X version of looks a bit more complicated to run than the Windows version.

It would be interesting to see what others are saying about these files.

Isn't Limewire able to tell if a file is somehow different from other files with the same name/filesize? No?