I orginally asked this question over in the Hrdware forum thinking that this could be a hardware issue. I am beginning to think that this might be an issue with something installed or setup incorrectly on my box.

every single bin file I download is corrupt, and so far 75% of the rpms that I have downloaded have been corrupt. The way that I understand it is that there is a check against a number in the file and if that number doesnt match it says the file is corrupt. Could something be wrong with the file that is making that determination. Can some please give me a hand as I am running out of ideas. I still have a firewall on most download but that is configured as default and doesnt strip incoming packets. I also have iptables running.

Also RH 9 .. sorry

found the issue it was with a faulty IDE controller, got a new one and now it works like a charm.