firstly, ill just reply to the outstanding stuff.
A large and growing number of people post very similar questions to what you posted. Almost always it turns out that they have not searched the forums at all or even looked at recent posts before they ask the same questions over and over again. That's come to almost be expected around here, but we do like to point out the documentation section and the importance of searching the forums in the hope that it might give some lurker a little insight on how they can help themselves and get answers much faster than by repeating a question and waiting for an answer.
i gotta confess i didnt do a good search in the forums, i typed in some vague searches and gave up after a few trys i did look at the documentation section before i started to download but didnt take it all it - my fault.
The md5 check seems to be the most common thing that people just ignore. The number of times it's been pointed out as important only to be ignored for days while a poster keeps asking the same questions amazes me
i overlooked the importance of the md5 check because id never heard of it and didnt know how to use it.

i know the attack wasnt personal 1/2 the problem was me beening uptight cause i dont want to loose the important stuff on my laptop and its all XP's fault.

secondly heres today new problem. i started to d/l knoppix off another, differnt mirror site last night, left the machine on and came down about an hour ago to see that hte download has completed, or so it told me. the dialogue box said 686MB in 5h 53min from cslab.vt.edu i then went start>run>command and typed the location of where i had saved the .iso file to. following that i typed "md5sum -c KNOPPIX_V3.8.1-2005-04-08-EN.iso" it told me that there was an error in the exe file. i was using md5sum.exe which was in the same folder as knoppix_xxx.iso.

If you're dowloading other than by torrent, you really do need to use a decent download manager: doing it through a browser is asking for trouble.
i have asked and recieved the trouble so now im going to look into a decent download manager as i do not have torrent installed on the machine. thanks for that advice.