The old hardcoded bootstrap sites are hostile now and the original
default web caches are outdated too. They are probably falling back on
the few they can find and there's your flood. At least it's a relatively
small flood. ;]

I updated my gwebcache.dat manually with new sites and put all the old
caches in HOSTS list a few years ago when Free Peers shut down. I'll
ask our BearDiag guy to add this minor housekeeping to his program.

Do you think the Spybot S&D guys would be willing to add some more
bad and missing sites to their HOSTS filters? That goes out only to
Windows machines, where BearShare works. The Bluetack guys have
already blocked the worst of them as anti-p2p so things should settle
down as the weaker users migrate to newer software.