IE corrupts downloads. Intended feature, by design?

Now normally I always use wget but when the web site wants referrer and user agent to be spoofed I figured I'd give IE7 a chance to show it's not totally useless only to be disappointed. (In end resorted to wget + spoofing)


As everyone knows IE Team loves their temporary folders and these days it's possible to download*a file that's big enough to run out of space if your system/temp drive isn't the place you store big things. What happens is that IE lets your system drive run out of space instead of checking the space in the temp drive, then move the partially downloaded file to where you originally in Save dialog asked it to go in the first place and say all is well even though it's corrupt. Thankfully it was an archive so I atleast got a notification of corruption trying to extract it.*I*fail to understand how making users worry about space on more than one drive fits in the ease of use that Microsoft usually tries to achieve in its consumer products.

Now some smart*guy in IE team will laugh and think*I should've*moved my temp folder to the drive I had close to a terabyte of free space and tried to download the file to. But it doesn't work! What if the temp drive has 800 *gigabytes* of free space but you want to download the file (1 TB) to a network share that has 10 TB of free? When IE "download dialog team" was planning this feature they should have anticipated people will use IE for enough years down the road to anticipate bigger downloads and stop using the temporary folder.



Vista "need to waste some of this excess processing power Team" took a page from IE "file download algorithms and processes team" and added this feature that if you have self-extracting installer.exe that is*say 1*GB in size, Vista will copy this to temporary folder under Windows**to "verify it". Now depending on the installer*it gets re-verified by the installer itself and then it extracts it to temp folder and copies the temp folder back... = 5 gigabytes of total read+writes to install 1 GB file. Anything to keep hardware partners like Intel happy I guess?