I now believe that the Zune testing teams should do more testing on dealing with podcasts. They should do some of the testing on low speed Internet connections & see if the Internet is still usable while the software is downloading all the episodes of a podcast they just subscribed to.
I choose the podcasts listed because they have things the software has issues with these are PDF files & tons of episodes in a feed. The first three have a high percentage of PDF files in them & the last one has a large number of files in it enough that I think it is a good test of someone trying out several podcasts with just the one source. So without any further delay that are the following “Cadence Revolution”, “Learn Japanese with Beb and Alex“, “MAKE Magazine: MAKE Podcast“, & “TEDTalks (hd)“. I list these because they have challenges for the Zune software.
Oh also upon further study, that is to say I subscribed to the “TEDTalks (hd)” podcast I found out that me previous test wasn’t 100% up to snuff. The reason my Internet was better after making that one change is that the Zune software wasn’t trying to download the new massive podcast yet. So Microsoft is having issues that early BitTorrent software had, that is it has no limits on the amount of bandwidth used at any given time. This was solved by the various programs adding the ability to change the limit on individual computers so that they would not kill their Internet while downloading Torrents. I wish Microsoft would have the sense to do the same thing with the Zune software.