If you're having problems with the downloads getting reset just before the end, I may have found one plausible culprit - a real-time antivirus solution, optionally combined with software used for the download (in my case, Eset Smart Security and Opera, respectively).

I noticed that my PC swaps heavily near the end of the download, I traced it back to my AV which scans all downloaded files. It seems to do it in a way, which halts the download just before the end, extracts it (whether to memory or to %temp% I cannot say), scans it, and allows the download to finish. I believe that the download time-outs while the AV performs the scan (which can take some time due to the large file size).

In my case the smaller download (IE10, 2.7G) worked fine on first attempt. The 5-6G ones (IE9+IE10) always failed, and I was not able to resume the download (in Opera). I managed to successfully download the IE10 file by disabling my AV temporarily near the end of the download, but for some reason it didn't work for the other one. What did work is downloading it via wget (as recommended above) - I encountered the same swapping (AV extract+scan) near the end of the download, but wget was able resume the download after the original connection timed out.

So people who have a similar problem should either use wget or a download manager that can resume downloads properly.

Rey, one alternative to torrents would be to provide the files without zipping them - the compression is negligible, plus AVs should be able to scan the files without extracting them first.

In any case, can you please consider:

* providing WinXP images for IE6-8 (smaller footprint than Win7, which is an overkill for old IEs)
* providing md5 or sha checksums for all downloadable files (I'm sure some people would feel more at ease if they could verify their integrity post-download - due to their file size and also because of the unzip problems on non-Windows systems)

Regadless, a huge thanks to you and your team for this initiative. Having official non-VirtualPC images is really appreciated.



P.S.: if anyone is looking for the checksums, I'm sharing mine for downloads dated 20-21 Feb 2013:
21b0aad3d66dac7f88635aa2318a3a55 *IE8_Win7.zip
58d201fe7dc7e890ad645412264f2a2c *IE9_Win7.zip
cc4e2f4b195e1b1e24e2ce6c7a6f149c *IE10_Win8.zip

They're not official, but the files seem to work fine in VirtualBox.