Thanks for the comments. I did implement port forwarding after it was suggested by one of the responders (and I read about it). As I haven't worked in linux a lot, I am not familiar with using cat to copy the CD.

The 10th time I attempted to use Bittorrent, I chose "open" rather than save to disk and the client opened immediately and started downloading (I don't see this mentioned in the FAQ and it doesn't seem obvious except in hindsight<g>). While the download speed wasn't as high as many others have reported (~20-25 k/sec), it kept chugging along overnight and in the morning was complete, and looks to be the correct size (I haven't yet checked the MD5 sum).

Thanks to both responders.

Steve