One of the most persistent complaints to operators of Web sites which
provide downloadable archives is that files on their
servers are “corrupted”. As is so often the case when
corruption is mentioned in connection with computers, the problem is
not at the Web site, the user's computer, nor on the Internet which
interconnects them, but at Microsoft, whose incompetently implemented
attempt at a Web browser randomly truncates downloads and then
compounds the problem by storing the truncated file in its cache and
supplying it for subsequent download attempts.
This document
describes the problem and suggests alternatives which avoid such
problems. A companion document,
Downloading
Files from Fourmilab with FTP, provides a step-by-step tutorial
for the alternative of downloading with Microsoft's command-line FTP client,
while explaining why, thanks to how laughably obsolete this
program is, it is sadly not an option for many Internet users.