I think it's more a case of making the downloader "proxy aware". I've seen this with many small utilities that try to make an HTTP call without taking into account the system wide proxy settings. Unfortunately for me, I work for one of the largest tech companies in the world...talking to sys admin and getting proxy settings changed is out of the realm of possibility for me. I'll use the manual download workaround for now.

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I'm having the same problem and I think it might be related to my corporate proxy server. Has anyone checked into whether an HTTP proxy server (as defined in Internet Explorer's settings) will cause the download to fail? I think it would explain all the symptoms described in this thread, as well as what I'm seeing.