I've been having trouble with the "Podcasts" item in my tree for some time, and it's finally gotten quite annoying so I'm going to post a listing here.
1. Crashes and locks, oh my. Quite often when I click on Podcasts in the tree, MC freezes for extended periods of time (and occasionally crashes on me). I'm suspicious that this has to do with issue #3 and thumbnailing in general, but it's quite annoying.
2. No way to disable Auto-Download of Podcasts and have it stick. This should be accessible from Tools --> Options --> Podcasts. Currently, the only way to do this is temporary from within the Podcasts --> Downloaded Podcasts item in the tree, and it doesn't "stick". When you re-start MC it turns back on. I want one of my machines to do the downloading, and the others to just browse the podcasts.
3. For some weird reason, a bunch of my RAW files (CRW and CR2) keep showing up in the Downloaded Podcasts list. I can't see anything in their tags that would cause this, though the tags for these files are strange (they auto-filled with a bunch of the EXIF data for the pictures). This means that when I select this tree item, MC generally freezes and stutters for long periods of time while DCRAW.exe builds thumbnails. Performance is utterly terrible. On my Pentium D 3.2 GHz box, I often see periods where MC12 is frozen for more than 3-4 minutes at a stretch (after which it quickly completes any commands I gave it and then freezes again).