Urbane Tiger

have you reinstalled, if so could you let us know what happened

reading through your posts it seems to be a file system issue rather than an
'net issue, the files do download but they disappear as soon as they've
finished, yet you can copy files - that's how you got Firefox onto the
system.

Have you looked through the processes & services that are running on your
system, and are they all kosher

I would not be hard to write something that monitored downloads and deleted
files as soon as they've finished, even I could do that. The fact the
problems persists under Safe mode makes me feel this is a malware problem,
packaged as a driver (not sure I could do that)

BTW what did you use to scribble on those images at vistax64 - I use .Bug
Shooting which allows me to type stuff and draw shapes, but hand written has
a lot more impact.