Back when I first looked into file sharing (or filesharing), I was unpleasantly surprised to learn
Kazaa comes with spyware. So obviously that was not an option for me.

Some time later, I came across WinMX. WinMX comes without any decent explanation, so perhaps that explains why I heard little about it from friends and other people. They use Kazaa or eDonkey. WinMX isn't that hard to set up though, a lot can be learned by simple experimenting. If that scares you off, there is also a guide available from someone, and ofcourse you can search the web or newsgroups for info.

Since I never used other programs, I can't say for sure if there are much more or much less files and participants for WinMX. I usually stick to a program I really like. WinMX also offers so-called hash values for files. Basically, the hash is a checksum for a file, so if you know the hash, you can be sure you download the right file. hashes for
movies are made available through all kinds of sources, including Sharepoint.

Perhaps the key to successful downloading is to use several programs, so you can be quite sure that you'll find whatever you're looking for. MLdonkey appears to be a program that can do that, but I haven't tried that one yet.

I also want to give Bittorrent a try soon, just because it offers a new way of file-sharing. Or at least a new way of distributing the links to files.

[Edit 22-09-05: WinMX is temporarily down.]