Well, not a solution, but rather a reason.

The reason for this temp location, is so that if you were to say quit the download part way through, you can simply go back to the location of the downloaded and resume, without having to restart from the beginning. Especially useful for large files.

As far as resolving it.... why? It would take no less time to not have the temp location (being it were possible to elminate it) and store it on a zip disk. Reason, is where else is the computer to store the file as it comes across?? There has to be some temp location to store the file as it is being "built" in the file destination. Kind of like a buffer.

Hope this helps

Not only that, but you can not change the download location.

This is default browser behavior, and cannot be changed. Mozilla, or any other browser, will do essentially the same thing, even under Linux. Besides, you never want to download a file directly to a floppy or Zip disk -- you should always D/L it to the hard drive first, since floppies and Zips are relatively unreliable.

I'm not so sure about that "cannot be change" part. Somewhere in the code the brower is told where to store temp files, so at least in the case of mozilla this behaviour could be changed to another location (of course you'd have to recompile it).

The part of his question which is most bewildering to me is that this only started after he switched to broadband. So could one infer that this is not the behaviour with dialup internet settings? And if so, why?

Since broadband file transfers are so much quicker, the time required to do the transfer from Temp to destination is more noticeable. Also, transfer to floppy or Zip disk is relatively slow -- this exacerbates the problem.

Ahh, good points! Seems obvious now that you say it