Ultra slow and stalling downloads of work units

After years of inactivity I have re-installed Seti@home here on 6 PC's. I noticed the past days that downloading of workunits is very inefficient. I have to keep forcing each PC manually to do this. If I let Boinc tak care of this, it will easily postpone donwloading for up to 7 or 8 hours, which leaves that PC wihtout workunits for all that time.

I also notice that many workunits are only downloaded partially and just stop at like 90% or so, after which the rest is postponed again. That means sometimes only a few kB need to be downloaded to finish the workunit, but that again is stalled for hours.

How can downloading a file of a few hundred kB take ages nowadays with download speeds of 1.something kBps. These are 1200 baud modem speeds of the 80's!!
Is there no other way of distributing these files? This is such an inefficient use of processor time.