Any ideas anyone? Just in the last few weeks, downloading has become a serious problem. Seems to download fine, but the files are practically always corrupted, mostly it takes me 3 or 4 tries to even get a 1-2 meg dl done; goddess forbid I should need to dl 30+ meg!

Help?
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Just to run through the basics, did you do a clean install of firefox 1.0, with a new profile? I had major problems with Firefox 1.0 and my old extensions, I've been lazy from .8 to .9 and kept the same profile, but it caught up to me finally, I'd held off upgrading to 1.0 until a few days ago on my main system, finally did it, but after a day of frustration I remembered the excellent advice to start with a fresh profile on each new version of Firefox, I reinstalled all my extensions, created separate profiles for .9 and 1.0, which takes forever because I use so many, but it all works.

Nice thing about that is unlike for example Opera, where you actually need to test every single subversion out there for weird new or old bugs, I'm getting downright lazy with firefox, it's going to work, it's been working since mozilla 1.0 more or less, way before phoenix 0.5, small bugs here and there, but overall it's so darned steady version to version, really it's just improving. But some bugs are around still, like the ones around the gecko core, download etc. Those bugs are the ones that the alpha and beta testers simply didn't really test heavily, mostly because most alpha and beta testers dont' tend to use dialup. So that's exactly where I'd expect to see bugs appear.

Microsoft had and has the same problems, if you've ever met an alpha tester/developer, you have a pretty good idea of what windows will or won't do well without ever seeing it actually work, it does well what the alpha testers care about.

However, I did read another thread where the main cause of the issues was dialup. Have you gone to the firefox forums on mozillazine and checked them out, try asking for a solution, I think the problem is that the dialup connection may temporarily fail, it's hard to say, I'm spoiled, downloaded about 730 mB last night in about an hour. Some of which you'll be seeing.

Have you checked out if there are any download manager type extensions? Or maybe a third party download manager. Although adding too much stuff can further complicate the situation.
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I've tried all the download extensions. None of them work reliably. I didn't "new profile" it though - I supposed I'd best uninstall and do that, though WHY would it start all of a sudden?

Yes, it could as well be dialup/30 year old phone lines/nasty wet winter cold icky slimy muddy ugly weather - except the weather hasn't changed since early November, and again, this just started....

Could OF COURSE be worse - could be IE....!
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I'm telling you, I ignored the advice to always use a new profile for each upgrade firefox, until it just completely fell apart.

You don't need to uninstall firefox, just copy your profile directory somewhere else, then delete the original, while firefox is closed. Then simply follow the directions in this thread to get back all your user data from the old profile to the new one.

Note, restart firefox before copying over that data, the profile manager box will come up, create a new profile there, don't use the default profile, make one, that was my mistake, I got lazy and kept reusing the 'default' one until it just totally failed, now I have one profile for each recent firefox version, more or less anyway.

Once you create the new profile, say vkff1.0, firefox opens, populates that profile. Close firefox, drag over the files listed in that thread, and you're good to go. Then redo all the extensions, making sure to get uptodate ones, firefox 1.0 compatible ones.

This totally solved all my issues, my firefox had totally destabilized after the upgrade to 1.0 from 0.9.3, but it was a corrupted and mixed profile.

But I'm not convinced that will solve the problem, I really suspect that the dialup speed connections just weren't adequately tested or debugged, there's all sorts of timeouts and so on that you would never see over broadband that you will sometimes see over dialup, it's that 'sometimes' that really gets you though when you're doing debugging.

However, the kinds of problems you see with downloads I saw with some other features, especially tabbed browsing, it was just completely unstable, I had to reboot a bunch of times just to get firefox working again, but the new profile, new extensions, totally settled the problem for me.
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