Downloads disappear!!!!

Vista Home Premium - 32bit - No Service Pack - this acer laptop had all the networking completely hosed. I have been able to successfully get the onboard wifi working and can surf with it (I'm using it now) but anything I download seems to vanish. It shows the download progress, shows that it finished, but when I open the folder where it should have been saved, the download is gone. I've changed the 'save to' location, changed the name of the download file, performed in-depth searches after the file has downloaded and never found it. I've tried both IE and Firefox. Attached is a screen shot of the Device Manager and you'll notice that all of the networking components are jacked up except for the wifi adapter. How the **** do I fix these items? I've tried re-installing 'em but they just don't install, neither does the Broadcom gigabit connection.
:banghead

(at least I got the wifi working! LOL )

THANKS!

 

Firefox - options - downloads - - - check that the downloads folder is not set to a missing USB stick or removeable drive.

 

Uhhhh.... thanks, but I think you need to re-read my post.....

. . . and . . .

I think that it would be next to impossible to save something to a non-existant drive.... how could I browse to it to select it as the 'save-to' location? And if it was pre-set as the 'save-to' location, an error would pop up saying the "drive or folder is inaccessible". I get NO errors or messages. Everything points to a healthy perfect download except that there's no file after the process finishes.

 

That's the whole point - it doesn't save ... Downloads disappear!!!! - just like the thread title.

I have the current FF plus Alpha of FF 3.7.pre whatever - each time I download something from FF it disappears - because it tries to save to a USB stick that was last used 2 weeks ago; every time I have to reset the options for downloads - even though when I hit to Browse for the folder, it's already nominated the correct folder on an installed drive.

There never are any error messages about drive or folder inaccessible for me, the download just never happens.

I use IE only when all else fails.

There may well be a bug in some versions of FF under certain circumstances,

I'm only relaying my experiences and suggesting you double-check what's happening - reboot and test.

 

I didn't mean to sound like an a-hole, but I only tried FF when IE didn't work. And I tried both an older FF Portable release, and the newest 3.5 stable release. I have double-triple-quadruple checked everything in IE to try to figure out why something downloads then apparently completely vanishes from the PC. The download doesn't even show up in any temp folders or anything. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the extraordinary amount of yellow exclamation points in the device manager under the network category. My primary goal is to get IE working correctly (it's not my PC and the owner of it doesn't like change). So, thanks for your suggestions, but I have checked all that stuff numerous times. I think if I can get the device manager cleaned up, it will solve the problem.

 

OK- this laptop has 2 user accounts, the main account I was using yesterday, and another one (there's a guest account too but it's very limited). This other account actually downloads, but right at the end of the download an error pops up (see screen shot attached below). If I click on "Try Again", the download usually completes w/o disappearing. So now I'm a bit more confused..... any help or suggestions will be appreciated.
Thanks.

 

Hi dlb, have tried disabling the UAC? (if it's enabled that is)

That is the cause of many prob's in vista.

Q

 

It reads like the A/V or Windows Defender is scanning the temp file.

 

The error show opera portable so I'm confused. Are you trying to download opera portable or is the error mentioning a different browser?
It also shows a copy problem.
Look if the person has opera on the computer. If not, maybe at some point someone used opera portable and it tries to handle internet downloads.

At one point in time, I couldn't find my downloads using FF. I discovered that an upgrade changed the default download location to C:\ ! I thought I had done something wrong but when it happened on more than one computer, I suspected that the upgrade "forgot" my user selected setting for downloads.

 

Definitely on the right track here. I removed an expired Norton using SymNRT about 5 minutes after my previous post, and can now download normally!!!! Before removing Norton, I found that I could download normally if I used Portable Opera which got me thinking that the portable version of Opera probably uses a different method or different temp download location which allowed the files to actually be saved instead of being removed. Also- before I removed Norton, the HD activity light was on almost constantly, now it's off. So- to sum it up- the download problem has been fixed, but I still have all the yellow marks in the device manager, and no matter how I try, I cannot get the ethernet driver re-installed, and Vista keeps disabling it. I think I'll start a new thread to address the device manager mess.
Thanks to all that posted! :highfive

[dlb]
:-D

 

Symantec have a lot to answer for ...

Pleased to read you got that tracked down , I'll look into your new thread now.