You are not alone.
My wife and i have been trying to update our computers since yesterday morning when the patch went out. Neither of us can get past the first 147 MB.
I had this problem last patch, but since my wife did not, i was able to copy her files after she updated. Unfortunately, since SE IMMEDIATELY deletes the update file when it finishes downloading and applies the update, you have to copy over nearly the whole game and not just the update.

None of this happened in the 1.0 game client, and we were not required to fully log in every time we wanted to give it a try.
could we please have a separate method for downloading the patches?