Dear John

Due to the file size, there are all sorts of bizzare issues. If you
could provide us any more debugging information, that might help us
identify and fix the problem (eg: see if you can see any output on the
console).

But if you want a workaround, you can use the following to download it
any way you like:
http://files.kde.org/edu/kstars/download.kde.org/kstars/

Then uncompress and extract the tarball into some place where KStars
can search for it. On Linux, this might be ~/.local/share/kstars/ or
/usr/share/kstars/ if you are installing globally. Not sure where it
is on Windows.

I don't have a sha1sum for the tarball, but the extracted
USNO-NOMAD-1e8.dat file has the following sha1sum on my laptop:
12e663e04cae9e43fc4de62d6eb2c69905ea513f

Regards
Akarsh