Is something wrong with the IBM's download director or has my network gone bad? I work for a consulting company that is an IBM partner and as a result I can download stuff from IBM's partnerworld website. I used to choose the download director, which is an applet that makes multiple connections and can pause and restart and download. But every time I choose the download director, it stops working after a while. My laptop shows that I am (wirelessly) connected, my desktop shows that the (wired) connection is alive but nothing works!!! No page loads and the download director shows "connection refused" message. The ipconfig command returns all the values except the "Connection specific DNS suffix" entry shows nothing next to it.

The only way out of this is to restart the modem and the router, wait for the laptop to reconnect to the network, start the download director (fortunately it picked up from where it left off) and wait for the same thing to happen again. I have tried everything including downloading files in the night, downloading them to a directory that would result in a smaller path length (c:\temp) and even starring at the download window for a long time! The only thing I could observe was that it stopped working every time the download director made 8 connections.

Finally, I have given up on the download director. I use the plain http download now. The only drawback is that I have to download one file at a time but it downloads much faster and doesn't die in between.

I have a feeling that something in the network drops the connectivity due to too mane connections working simultaneously (my ISP?). While the whole process of downloading, installing and configuring IBM products is tedious and time consuming, the tools I get to use at the end of it are a lot of fun. If some one knows how to make the download director work without breaking the connection, let me know.