Many years of being on the receiving end of issues shows that there are a large number of different potential problems which manifest themselves in similar ways. Some are fixed, some persist, some may be new. If people don’t file issues describing exactly what they tried and what happened, this vague complaint just goes into the bucket of “Who knows? Hopefully someone else files a proper bug report.”

I’m not sure what issue you think you identified by googling such a short problem description, but it seems like it could be any of:

- slow internet connection

- firewall / proxy issues

- antivirus gumming things up

- file system being slow when dealing with lots of small files (Windows mostly)

- precompiling Plots took longer than expected

- precompiling Plots hit a deadlock

- loading Plots took longer than expected

- loading Plots hit a deadlock

- something else?

Worse, what “stuck” means is also ambiguous. Does that mean it failed with an error? Does that mean a download started but then was too slow for the user’s taste? Does it mean that a download started but never got any data at all? How long did the user wait?

My best guess is that git cloning the registry on Windows is taking a long time and isn’t actually stuck. There’s a fix for that being worked on for 1.7 (don’t unpack registries).