I think the Polish users went independent after Free Peers went out of
business and have been supplying their own cache lists because most
of the built-in defaults are no longer online. This could explain heavy
traffic at some webcaches and no problems at others. Hopefully they'll
keep adding good caches to their own list, spreading the load a little
better. I wish I knew someone over there so I could ask because
Polish translation doesn't appear to be available online.

As for the search floods I don't know. I don't get DDOSed after searches.
I guess it depends on what you were searching for. It might be worth
experimenting on to see if it's deliberate or a software problem.

While I was checking this I found an anti-P2P company operating a
cache. It's going directly into a Bluetack list and my own. ;]