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Hey LL - totally hear you on both fronts. With Linkscape, Ryan's precisely right. We went crawling deeper on large sites, and, as I noted in the blog posts around this issue, encountered these binary files. We attempted a fix for the past index using a blacklist of file types. It only caught about 40% of them. We were hoping that would be closer to 90%. We've got two new indices running. One that launches mid-November that will have more of these files removed but not all, and another in December when we think we'll have them all cleaned out. In terms of Google's search query data in Keyword Difficulty, that does suck. Google turned off our API access and we've been going back and forth with them to try to turn it on. We, along with a few hundred other tools, got shut off all together and trying to get back in has been a long, painful process. However, the tool does not rely on this data to get accurate reports (difficulty doesn't care how many times something's searched, just how competitive the top results are, which is what we look at). Thus, the tool's still fully operational, and you can still grab the KW data from Google's AdWords tool or your own API access (not as convenient, I agree). TL;DR - We're fixing the OSE binary files issue by December (maybe sooner) and working with Google to try to get the Adwords API data back in KW Diff (but no guarantees). Hope that helps and a million thanks to Ryan for jumping in and helping out on this. He's not an official rep or a Moz employee, but seriously appreciate him going above and beyond.

Please see Carin's response to this issue in another Q&A: http://www.seomoz.org/q/competitive-edu-research-via-open-site-explorer In short, it's a bug with the last Linkscape index. OSE is scheduled to be updated on Tuesday and that will (hopefully) resolve this issue.