Interesting... on the Gronmayer site is there one button that will install all defaul repositories, or are you finding them individually on the list? Or maybe you just hit the select all box and install everything?

This problem might be more than just with these applications, it might be something else causing it. I just tried to install modest directly from its website, and I got the same "Downloading Modest failed". I'm really not sure whats going on.