** update 7:38pm 10/16/2010 **
got it working. i ended up having my younger brother come over and i copied his entire wow directory over to my netbook. it worked flawlessly. now i am in the process of pushing the working 4.0 copy of wow to the server so i can download it to my slack box and still have a viable copy.

it may have worked if i wanted to wait the 16 hours it was telling me it would take to download. however, the downloader kept constantly informing me of a firewall in place. which was definitely not the case. i had all the ports open on the untangle router, the untangle firewall, windows firewall exceptions in place as well. hell, i even went into my ddwrt router and setup port forwarding on that as well. even when i shut off the firewall on untangle, shut off the av on untangle and had the ports wide open to the pc, the blizzard downloader still told me i was behind a firewall. thats when i gave up and called my brother.

** end update **

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** update 12:40pm 10/16/2010 **
still absolutely no progress. i even deleted wow entirely, removed all instances in the registry, removed all the temp files, hell even the icons. i then downloaded the actual installer from battle.net. it failed at 20%. it fails at 20% every time i try to install the game. both on windows xp and on slackware.

as usual the wow forums are borderline useless. the wine forums have yet to yield anything i can use either.
** end update **

** update 8:35am 10/16/2010 **
i downloaded the patch in its entirety last night. i tried to install it on a 3.3.5 copy of wow that i had on my vm. still now luck. i get a fatal error and wine crashes and it produces the same error as before

i saw here at the wine bug forums that a new ~/.wine would fix the problem. that still didnt work.

i have now removed wine-1.1.42 and built from source wine-1.3.0. i even removed the ~/.wine and have had no success in installing the new patch.

even in windows the patch fails to install. i am copying the entire wow directory from my slack install with the new patch over to my windows xp machine and am going to see how that pans out.

if all else fails i will have my older or younger brother bring one of their pcs over to my place and i will copy their currently working version of wow (which, they both used my 3.3.5 copy from my server to install on)
** end update **

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** update 7:49am **
nothing has worked so far. when i ran the repair.exe it halted and told me it was unable to repair wow and i had to reinstall. this happened on both my slackware box and my xp box. so i deleted wow entirely on both machines and now i am copying my working backup of my vm server to both machines. i will post more if i get anything to work.

once again, thank you blizzard. 12,000,000 * $15.00 = $180,000,000. with this kind of money monthly you would think the patch and update process would be smooth as hell. but no. every single patch results in some kind of issue. (as you can see they brag about 12 million players here)

** end update **

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** update 7:35am **
https://us.battle.net/account/downloads/WoW-4.0.0-WOW-enUS-Installer.exe
failed as well. i am going to try a couple different options in wine as well. i saw on the ubuntu forums that some people had to upgrade wine in order to get the new patch to work. i refuse to change my version of wine again. i already had to regress my kernel and version of wine and i have no interest in doing so again.

** end update ***

---

here is what i have tried so far.

downloaded the patch via wine in slackware. attempted to install the patch and it failed. i ran the repair via wine and then ran the installer again and still no luck.

downloaded the patch via windows xp. attempted to install the patch and it too failed. i ran the repair and then ran the installer again. still nothing.

i have even tried installing the patch inside of windows 7. still epic fail. (thank you blizzard for not even attempting to release a stable patch).

now i have gone over to https://us.battle.net/account/downloads/WoW-4.0.0-WOW-enUS-Installer.exe
to download the patch installer. hope this works.

one would think that with the $15 per account and the 12 million users, blizzard would be producing flawless patches with guaranteed streaming downloads. but no. we are stuck with the p2p downloads at a whopping 250-350kbps. pure awesome.