I'm not sure why MS doesn't distribute the public releases over a P2P network. They would be able to support many more people downloading with less bandwidth problems.
I'm sure that the mere mention of "P2P" is a taboo at Microsoft (management). A lot of people have probably already suggested it, since the developers aren't stupid, but management probably can't do it for marketing reasons.
On the other hand, maybe they are leaking the RCs over bit-torrent early on purpose... puts on tinfoil hat
If I wasn't on such a limited coputer, I'd go looking for the improvements in windows 7 - I think there's a local caching feature for accessing files over a WAN link so that other clients can get files from their peers quickly instead.
