I disagree 100000%. Partial downloads is a unique way of disbursing the bandwidth necessary to download scarce files.

Think about it .. let's say there's one copy of a 50 meg file on the Gnutella network, and that guy is hosting on a 400k up connection.

As soon as one Xolox user has partially downloaded a meg of that file, another Xolox user can start downloading from source #1 (full) and source #2 (partial). This doubles the bandwidth of the second downloader and spreads the file to two (and momentarily three) people.

The third downloader can now hit up 3 places, two partials and one full, spreading the bandwidth bottlenecks to more and more people. And so on, and so on.

There's no doubt there is a risk to piecing together the partial downloads to make 1 final file, so indeed, don't eliminate the partial download functionality, just make the combination functionality really really robust.

I'd say 20% of the files I download from partial servers are corrupt. However, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.