downloads are too slow - not enough progress info

starting to dislike Steve Balmer's MSFT! ....

the install of the VS2005 service pack is going way too slow and there
is very little progress info. First the download said "verifying ..."
for 10+ minutes. Now it says "extracting ..." for the last 20
minutes. There is a green bar that is moving to the right ever so
slowly, but would be nice to see some numbers.

but, I did a lot of downloads on this formerly XP system ( which I
have stupidly upgraded out of dumb trust in MSFT ) and they never took
so long. Is there extra work being done in Vista when I download and
install software?

-Steve