Most downloads do not complete anymore

Question

I have a very weird problem where about half of the downloads I start can not complete. I found out when trying to download XBMC. If I download any of the files on the nightly builds page, thay halt at 0.3%, no matter what browser I try. If I try to download TortoiseSVN the download halts at the same position, no matter what browser I use and no matter what download site I use (tried Softpedia, SourceForge and others).

I tried using FreeDownloadManager to download the files. The program uses segments to download files, so it does complete further, but it never finishes either.

I've also tried downloading the XBMC build (just picked one pf the files that didn't work) on my laptop, then moving the file to my desktop and then run it. If I do that I get an error message reading "The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail.". I googled this error message and some people suggested removing and reinstalling the Visual C++ Runtime Redistributable. I removed all of them, rebooted, reinstalled all of them and rebooted again, but no luck.

Any ideas? Is my Windows installation corrupt, or could this be a faulty hard drive or memory module? I don't know where too look anymore.

Answer 1

Well, I did some hard disk checks and came up blank. Then I started swapping memory modules and that seems to have done the trick. I just removed them one at a time and with the second one I removed everything seemed to work just fine.

So it was a broken memory module. Weird that both IE and Opera would halt downloads at exactly the same percentage...