half of what i downloaded came back as trojans on virustotal
I don't like or trust Virustotal, as you get very often false positive.
Even with my own written program it gives me 5 red flags (from Engines i've never heard of before).
Reason: my program is a small converter and writes to the harddisk. Of course. That's what a converter is supposed to do.
Virustotal only utilizes about 70 engines and is itself out of control of the single results.
This means for my example: i've contacted the 5 engine providers to check my file and to adopt there patterns. No reaction in months!
I do not guarantee here anything, but i never ever had a trojan in the downloads here.
BTW, as former IT-Manager and now IT-Strategy-Consultant i know what i'm doing and i'm quite familiar with all of this stuff....so i'm not a "chatterbox".