Just to update, the only thing that worked in the end was a complete uninstall and reinstall. No idea what the real cause was but I suspect it has something to do with SE or my ISP and not my machine (routing issue or traffic shaping perhaps).

This should probably get looked at eventually, especially for those who has download caps as an 11GB download I imagine takes up a fair chunk of their monthly usage, fortunately I do not have these limitations but with the attempts made in the previous post plus a reinstall I must have downloaded a total of near 20GB.

Either way problem solved so lock/delete w/e it is you do.