I can't solve your problems, have been having more and more myself with Knoppix lately and have switched to Linux Mint for a lot of uses. Hopefully someone else will help.
As to the two nine hour downloads, that can depend greatly on your Internet connection and maybe you really need to take 9 hours (I remember when downloading the CD took 24 hours if I was lucky). But I expect that you are not downloading from the torrents which are much faster than from the mirrors and much much more reliable (no reason to ever download the same file from the torrents twice). If you are not using the torrents to download then download a torrent client and start using them, or at least embrace your 9 hour download times and refrain from complaining about them when you could be downloading a lot faster.
One hint on using the torrents. Don't panic when you see an estimate of the download taking even more than 9 hours as the client first starts and abort the download. The client will start slow but then pick up speed. The download time estimates should pick up speed and finally level off. Watch the numbers and ten to fifteen minutes in to the download you'll have a much better idea of how long things are going to take.
Learn to do the checksum test too if you are not doing that. If the md5 checksum matches then don't bother downloading again, your results will not improve.
If you are using the torrents and it is still taking 9 hours, please post back what download speed you are paying for and the name of your ISP. You might have something seriously misconfigured. Or your ISP might be deliberately slowing torrent downloads on you.