Some people, myself included, have been getting an error along the lines of "Received unexpected end of file from server" when patching.
Looking in the launcher.log reveals something like this:
2011/07/26 09:19:32:122 INFO g.a: Attempting to refetch 'digest.txt' from 'http://download.threerings.net/spiral/20110721120606/digest.txt'.
2011/07/26 09:19:32:163 WARNING g.a: getdown() failed.
java.net.SocketException: Unexpected end of file from server
at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.parseHTTPHeader(Unknown Source)
at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.parseHTTP(Unknown Source)
at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.parseHTTPHeader(Unknown Source)
at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.parseHTTP(Unknown Source)
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(Unknown Source)
at java.net.URL.openStream(Unknown Source)
at com.threerings.getdown.a.e.h(Unknown Source)
at com.threerings.getdown.a.e.a(Unknown Source)
at com.threerings.getdown.a.e.p(Unknown Source)
at com.threerings.getdown.a.e.b(Unknown Source)
at com.threerings.getdown.launcher.Getdown.run(Unknown Source)
Some suggest navigating to http://download.threerings.net/spiral/20110721120606/digest.txt and also the appropriate getdown.txt page, and downloading them manually.
In my case, and a couple of others I've stumbled upon, navigating to the digest.txt url produces something along the lines of a Content Encoding Error in Firefox 4 (a.k.a Content Decoding Failed, or Error 330 in Chrome). Obviously, that makes testing that potential fix difficult. It also pretty clearly indicates that the HTTP Header parsing failing (see the stack trace) occurs for more than just the getdown Java downloader, at least on my machine. However, browsershots.org could load the page without any problems...
So... I shoved that URL into proxify.com, and it worked fine. Thus allowing me to manually download the digest.txt. This did solve the unexpected EOF problem.
I have no idea why my machine won't interpret the header properly, and if anyone knows, I'd be keen to resolve that.
In case it matters, the only firewall I have is the Windows Firewall, and I am running:
Windows 7 Professional x64
Java 1.6 (Update 25)
NOTE: I have the Steam version of SK, and only just got it yesterday, so this is the first time I have run the game.
The parse error I think is a result of being unable to read the data stream. It was mentioned in another thread that IE could fetch the files, but FF and Opera ran into the encoding error. Its commonly attributed to config problems on the server or proxy server thats compressing an already compressed data stream. trying to find out if disabling gzip in FF lets the browser fetch properly, but haven't found anyone to test it yet.