Same here. I have bought an update to elements 9.5 from 8.5 and it came with a download assistant quite some while back and it has never worked. I had contacted Steinberg for a link. Now that I tested it again, it is still not functional. Reinstalled the assistant, turned firewall off and what not. It can’t be it. The update link works fine, but the full version fails immediately. It won’t even start and flashes with “connecting” and then fails. I had hoped that has been fixed by now, but it has been disappointing. I can’t see what is possibly wrong, especially when one links works but teh other not. It does not make sense at all.
**** EDIT ****
I have grabbed my wife’s laptop to see if I got the same problem, and it didn’t have an issue. It started to download just fine. It means something is wrong with my windows. What, is beyond me. I did the above steps to take out as much obstacles, but no success. At least I now know it is definitely a Windows problem for me.