Quote Originally Posted by GarrionMarsh
...this computer has had a fair amount of viruses and it wouldn't surprise me. but no i tried it on a computer that has gotten limited use and no viruses. its gotten a new cpu, memory, and powersupply fairly recently.
That you can use the term "fair amount of viruses" is somewhat of a surprise. If I had even one I would do something about it right away. I certainly wouldn't ever have "a fair number". It does make me wonder about the other computer that you claim to have more faith in.

Quote Originally Posted by GarrionMarsh
the only thing i can think of is possibly it has something to do with the fact i have to go through my college's network and that might cause a problem?
No, there should be no issue at all using you school network. A small number of schools are blocking BitTorrent, but if that were the case you would not get a download at all. And you certainly wouldn't get a complete download and have a bad file, BitTorrent checks each block as it comes down. The only case that I know of where someone got a "bad" download with BitTorrent, they stopped the download as soon as the display said 100% rather than letting the download completely finish. And even then they were able to get a good download after they admitted what they did and I had them restart BitTorrent, it took a few minutes to check the files and then downloaded just the needed bloacks and the download was good.

Of coures, if BT is being blocked then you could fall back to the mirrors, but my experience with them is that they give bad files about 50% of the time. But when they do corrupt the file they always corrupt it in the same way, it would be quite unusual to get different md5 checksums for each download. Still, my recommendation is to use BitTorrent, and to let it check and repair what you have already downloaded with BitTorrent if needed, as long as you see BT packet activity.