Thanks for sharing this.
I can't eliminate the zero-byte files, for the reasons described by one of the posters to that bug forum. (I get hits on translation files at an average rate of 2-3 per second and peak rate of 50-100/second - if I let all those be 404 errors, the error log and server load get huge, and my host complains about not being able to detect denial of service attacks through the noise I generate.) Making them non-zero-byte but still not full translations won't help, and I can't generate translations in over 100 languages. And generating "fake" translations (e.g., making them all identical English ones) is (a) still much harder on the server and (b) misleading to users who actually aren't using English (a majority).
In my view, this bug should have been accepted and pushed out to 10.04 LTS as a patch to apt. But since that seems unlikely, the two solutions I see are:
1) Disable translation files (how to do this is also given in the same bug report) (part of the problem here is that around the same time, apt defaulted to always looking for translation files, which creates the noise that leads to the need for zero-byte files.....)
2) Disable this repository.
Given the actual frequency of updates here, option 2 with a periodic (once every 3-6 months or when a problem occurs) re-enable to see if a new driver version is available actually seems perfectly reasonable to me. It's clear to me from download stats that a sizable fraction of users are only checking for (or applying) updates every few weeks anyway.