Unsuccessful download in IE, Chrome, and Firefox.

Hello all, first I would like to introduce myself. My name is David, I live in Lubbock, TX. I have been using windows since 1995 and in that time I have encountered just about every issue imaginable and consider myself good at solving problems. This one is more of an annoyance than anything as I have found a workaround, but I'm at the point where I just can't give up til I figure it out.

It all started several months ago, I'd go to download a file via Chrome and it would go perfectly fine until like a light switch it would just stop. I can still browse the web and do whatever I want but the download just freezes. This would only happen via an internet browser, I have never had any trouble downloading via IRC or torrents. I regularly download 30Gb files via IRC at 1.9mb/s (my max speed) without so much as a hiccup. Torrents also never give any trouble.

So instead of chrome I try Firefox and exact same thing, and Internet Explorer... same. I don't download much through browsers so I kinda just wrote it off for the time. Then one day I reformatted my hard drive to get a clean install of windows 7 64bit (was using windows 7 32bit previously). Not even thinking about the download problem anymore after my fresh install, I go to nVidia's website to download the 200 something MB driver. And boom the download stops about 20% in. So I try IE and FF (firefox and chrome only take a few MB to download so that will usually work might have to try a couple times) and of course no luck. It just stops, sometimes 20% sometimes 80% and eventually after trying roughly 25 times I get the file downloaded. I have several issues with other drivers but nVidia's was the largest so therefore took more attempts to download. It won't even let me resume the downloads so I have to start all over when they freeze.

This is a completely fresh install of windows, practically the first thing I did was go to download drivers. No antivirus software whatsoever. I tried completely disabling Windows Firewall and even User Account Control, nothing helps. The worst part of the whole thing was downloading Iracing.com software, the install file was 500MB and finally after trying for hours I started using Firefox again and download an add-on called DownThemAll! and this would actually let me resume a download that froze. So I was able to get things downloaded by resuming every time it would fail. That is my so-called workaround, but I'd really like to know how to fix this. Also, Youtube videos will regularly freeze, pressing 'pause' and then 'play' will not resume playing the video, but if I back the video slider up just a second it will start back up.

I am 99.9% sure that this has nothing to do with internet connection due to IRC and torrents never having any issues. I do play Iracing online video game and never have any connection issues there. If anyone is interested in trying to help me solve this problem we could use Teamviewer and you can see whats going on.

Thanks in advance for any help or advice!

Welcome to the Seven Forums.

Do you have (or can you borrow) another computer to test with in your home? Try and connect this other computer to your network the same way your problematic desktop computer is connected. Then use IE on that other computer to try and download one of the same big problematic files.

Obviously, if this other (borrowed?) computer can download a large file or two via IE, then we can somewhat rule out network/router/modem/ISP weirdness.


There is a slim change that an infection survived the clean install. You might want to try one or more offline scanners like this one and this one.

This may not be useful at all, but I was able to download the video drivers and the Iracing software on my Samsung Galaxy using Chrome browser and my wifi without any problems at all.

Update: I installed Linux on this same computer to try it there, and the results are good. I was able to download a 557MB file at 1.9MB/s without slowing down once. Immediately thereafter, I booted back up into windows 7 and try the exact same 557MB file and the download went at 1.0MB/s and at 17 MB the download froze.

I always just assumed the lack of speed was just the website I was downloading from becuase I never have any problems with IRC or Torrent in that regard. But now I can also say my downloads via a web browser are slower than they should be as well as freeze every single time.

I download 3 different Linux distrobutions from 3 different websites and each one encountered the exact same issues. I had to use Firefox add-on that would allow me to resume the download.

Trying to download the files in the links you provided, the Kaspersky I can download with firefox plugin and I'll let you know how it goes soon, but the windows defender downloads a small .exe file that when opened downloads the full file and I am having trouble downloading that one, and of course resume will not work. Still trying, but the farthest I've got is 112MB out of 298MB.

Kaspersky Rescue Disc did a full scan and found no errors malicious software, except it says my media player Foobar is adware. Still haven't succussfully downloaded the Windows Defender.

WDO downloads about 300MB of stuff. It might take using another computer to get it.

You might try to find an older driver for your network adapter. If things once worked, then suddenly stopped - perhaps the latest drivers don't work well for you. When you installed the OS again, you might have used those same new drivers.

I did finally get Windows Defender and got a clean bill of health. The driver thing is a good idea. I use my motherboards onboard ethernet adapter and when I installed the OS I used the cd included with the motherboard for that driver. So perhaps I need the latest driver. I will do some driver testing later on tonight and update any progress. Thanks again for the help.

Seeing is how we have ruled out virii as a problem your post is useless. You know nothing of my computer habits. And there are plenty of legitimate torrents out there. A lot of Linux distributions are distributed via torrents. Torrents aren't just for pirated software anymore, so please don't just assume I am stupid. I am very safe, I have no malicious software on this machine. I don't do antivirus software because I don't like how over encumbering they are on a system. I don't download virii. So unless you have something helpful to contribute then please increase your post count elsewhere.