The patch loaded fine on my laptop but my tower failed on me.  I know I have something odd on my tower because for the first time in 4 years I actually had to install it.  Before now I used the trick where I could just copy it to the computer and run.  I am still running Windows 7 RC1 64 on it.  But it has worked fine for me.  So when the patch worked fine on my XP laptop and failed on my tower I knew that if it didn’t work I would be reinstalling the OS.  So lets start from the top.

I start wow and it kicks in the downloader.  The full screen one with the percentage counter in the middle and a big cancel button.  It is going so very slow compared to what I just saw on my laptop.  I cancel it once and start it over.  It started at 0% and I lost what I had.  So I left the room and did other things.  When I returned to log in to the wow client I get the message that the patch failed to apply and I had to do it again.  So I close wow and reopen it and start over.  This time it holds out at 0% for a long time and jumps to 100%.  Same message when I log into wow.

I open up the wow folder anddon’t see any of the patch files.  I kick of the launcher (because I tend to skip that).  It shows that download view like its downloading the patch but its at nothing with no indicator.  It looks like it froze as it opened.  Had to kill the process and ended up rebooting it.  I try it the normal way 2 more times and no go. I also tried running wow.exe “as Administrator”.

I head to the Blizzard forums and see lots of people having issues like this.  One sugestion I saw was to run 2 sessions of wow.  I tried a few variations of running 2 sessions of wow and I eventualy got it to work.  I opened 2 sessions and let them load to the login screen.  I then logged into both of them as fast as I could so they were both running the downloader at the same time.  And they both started downloading.  Not the jump for 0% to 100%, it actually did a download.

While they are downloading I decide to go hunt down the files.  At this point I have not seen any patch files.  It looked like scan.dll was changed because of the updated timestamp.  That looked a little strange to me but I don’t know how it should look.  When the first session finished downloading something different happened.  Windows 7 UAC prompted me asking if I wanted the BlizzardUpdater to run.  That was the first time all night UAC prompted me.  I let it run and it flashed past.    Then the 2nd wow session triggered UAC and I let it run but it said that the version I has was too new for it.  Looking at the Warcraft folder showed a few files with new date stamps.

I logged into wow and was presented with the authenticator prompt.  That was also the first time I saw that (I discovered I could enter random chars for the password and the downloader would start).  After I spent all that time getting it updated, my kids kicked me off the computer so they could play Warcraft.