Steven Susbauer wrote: I hadn't heard they were keeping it off akamai.

Me neither. Although I had it for a while I downloaded it from the Microsoft web site again twice today (did not bother to look where it resolved), from home and office, and it came each time in less than 15 minutes for the full network install file. Maybe there's something wrong with the incremental download (which I never use, even for home) but the full download worked full speed for me each and every time I tried.

I have heard they're asking ISP's not to mirror it (and any other mirrors), and have shut down bittorrent downloads. That's understandable as they would be blamed if someone downloaded a compromised version (strange how they didn't mind Sp1 mirroring...).

I can understand whu also, but it's all over eDonkey though and a little bird has emailed me several working bittorents for it (don't ask me even privately). Purely for educational purposes, I connected to eDonkey and started to download it about an hour ago. Currently I am downloading at 73kBytes/sec from 11 simultaneous sources out of 596 possible ones. http://home.pacbell.net/arn-py/photos/sp2.JPG It's not nearly as fast as downloading directly from Microsoft/Akamai though, but don't tell me that it's hard to get. When the download completes I will do a binary comparison with the one I downloaded from M$. Stay tuned. Bottom line: If you have a dial-up modem it does not matter where you get it from as it will take all night anyway, so get it from Microsoft there are less unknowns about the authenticity. If you have broadband, bittorrents gets nuked all the time and eDonkey is not as fast as Akamai, so also get it from Microsoft also. Michel.