apparently BT are blocking rapidshare and giving all the bandwidth to their vod and voip services , plus rapidshare have messed up by selling too many premium slots and having crappy old unreliable servers !!!!

i found a way round it - totally legal so don't worry aboot anything , it was posted on a uk adsl site a few days ago

just put this prefix

 http://195.122.131.250/

before your downlaod ( replacing the www.rapidshare.com  bit ) and hey presto !