I've been exploring the failure of my laptop to successfully download fanfics (while my desktop is succeeding just fine). The laptop's Windows 7, the desktop is Windows 8.
I fired up my laptop's calibre in debug mode and took a shot at downloading a fanfic. It hung, and the end of the log read:
Everything before that looked normal. The log just stopped when Calibre hung.
After I killed Calibre and went back to the library I'd tried downloading it into, I found that there was indeed an entry for that story complete with all its metadata, but that it didn't have any actual story associated with it - it was an empty book record with no formats. I went and dug up the epub FFDL created out of the temp directory, and it looked fine. So it would seem that FFDL successfully created the epub, successfully created the book record in Calibre, but then failed to bring the epub over and insert it. My first instinct when seeing something like that on Windows is to try running the program as administrator to see if that helps, but unfortunately it didn't in this case. Didn't really expect it.
I tried installing the 32 bit version of Calibre alongside the 64 bit one and it had the same symptoms. I'm a little reluctant to wipe Calibre out and reinstall entirely from scratch, since everything else is working okay and that would mean a lot of reinstallation and restoration work afterward. Any suggestions on how else I can investigate before I go to more drastic steps like that?