Enjoy.

Just as I was about to brute-force the unpack as you suggested, I ran the updater one more time because my copy of 1004 seemed corrupted - and for the first and only time since I downloaded the game a few weeks ago, it didn't give the final connection error - and it did the unpack as it should!

> Its an extremely weird bug.

Weird is right. Now it's gone away, like a ghost, and I've no idea why. I'm racking my brains but I'm certain I did nothing in the meantime that would have affected it in this way.

I'm guessing an there was an persistent net error somewhere that meant the launcher wasn't getting a green light to run the unpack command, and I just got lucky this time - in which case it's probably the fault of my Malaysian ISP. But I wonder are some people with similar Mod Content errors also in far flung regions, and the launcher doesn't seem to tolerate bad connections well?

I've still to test if I can get onto a server, but this looks like the breakthrough step.

its a bit onorthodox and I have absoloutly no guarantee this will work.  Go into each of the build folders, extract each of their contents to its location within your FirstStrike mod folder (make sure to "Merge" the folders, don't just copy over the top).

Once you've done that for all 5, startup your launcher and try to play.  I have honestly no guarantee this will work, its a pretty far out guess, but at this point there is no harm in trying.

Is the unpack/install in the form of a script file i wonder - or could I manually merge the zips into the mod folders with winrar  or something? The launcher aint doing it for me, I always get that last connection error, always have from the begining.

I'm not sure what it's trying to do on that last line, but the connection doesn't seem to be timing out at that stage - instead, immediately after downloading/skipping fsbuild_1005 it throws up that error - is it trying to get a final file from a different server that's blocked somehow?

Windows XP is correctly updated, recent hardware drivers, etc. BF2142 DLE runs fine and the launcher seems to quit ok after a while. I've tried increasing permissions for the fslauncher on the off-chance that the Vista problem is causing a similar effect in XP-SP3, but no luck.

One thing is left that make me think there is maybe more to the launcher process than just having the zip files -  If I set the Version to 1000 in the fslauncher preferences, with the zips in the mods folder, I get the following dialog when I do an update:

I always get that trailing connection error on the last line, no matter which zip files I have downloaded, or if I have downloaded none of them. This makes me suspect that there is meant to be a final initialisation file or command that I'm supposed to get, but dont.

And maybe that's also why the Version field of the fslauncher preferences doesn't update itself to 1005, even though it has detected that I have the files - I have to set it manually.

Anyway thanks again for all the help, I'll keep watch on the forums for any other fixes or updates and test them out as I see them.

This one was triumphant: http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/download.htm

So now we'll see Thanks.

Anyway, thanks again, another step forward in the great march of human progress!

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