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?