I have an idea, but can't try it for (according to iTunes) another 16 to 22 hours after all of Mad Men is downloaded. I'm so excited about that. 500 gigajiggles of data on my hard drive. Thanks, Apple, for not letting any of the aforementioned suggestions to stop the auto-downloading work or providing a simple way to solve this apparently never ending and ubiquitous problem. I've already unchecked the store items boxes, set prefs for not checking, even checked all the videos as "already watched", but nothing works. Every friggin' time I launch iTunes it starts downloading. Probably Apple's revenge for having the audacity of running it under Windows (Bootcamped on an MacBook Pro, but still Windows).
But I digress... here's the idea: Someone, somewhere said they offloaded downloaded videos to their external hard drive. Good. But then d/l starts up again after they do that. So how about this? AFTER you move files over so you can access them later, can't you just put in a dummy text file (for example) and name it the same filename as the one(s) moved so that iTunes "thinks" the file is still there and won't want to download again? Just fool the foolish program? Beat it at its own game?
I'll try this in a few weeks when all my forced (you know, "legitimate", like rape) downloads are finally finished, but in the mean time if anyone else tries it and it works, please let us all know.