I'm about ready to give up on bitcoin-qt. In the past few days I've tried everything from deleting peers, deleting the blockchain files, completely uninstalling and reinstalling, and connecting only to one "super node" in order to download faster and hopefully get non-corrupted data. Yet I've had it get stuck at certain blocks, freeze 12.04 Ubuntu to the point it forced a hard restart, corrupted block index file, and even a corrupted wallet file (Glad I kept backups from several months prior). I don't know why the big problem now, I'd been running the bitcoin-qt client for almost a year now with no issues. I would like to run a node for the greater good of the network, and I've got the bandwidth to do it, but this is ridiculous. Time to switch to blockchain.info wallet or Electrum.
i always DL from the same node.. but on this node I have the buffers set so high that it also tends to flood people off. i'm not sure if that's considered misbehavior or not, but it may ban the node. it gets the socket receive flood detected message
delete the index, retry...