Hi graves007,
I think the issue you were experiencing in your first post (where leaving ISP/Organization blank results in nothing happening) is a UI bug. If the databases you're setting links for already exist, the links are updated, but the 'Done' message doesn't display. You can fix that by replacing the ./piwik/plugins/UserCountry/Controller.php file with https://raw.github.com/piwik/piwik/1.X/plugins/UserCountry/Controller.php. Also, replace the ./piwik/plugins/UserCountry/GeoIPAutoUpdater.php file with https://raw.github.com/piwik/piwik/1.X/plugins/UserCountry/GeoIPAutoUpdater.php as I fixed another bug while looking into your issue.
The second issue could be caused by a lot of things. My guess, though, is that it took too long to download the file and the browser decided to stop waiting. We were aware of this issue when building the feature, so Piwik will actually try and download the file piece by piece. Unfortunately, Maxmind's servers don't allow doing this.
If you only care about the location database and/or ISP database, you shouldn't encounter any issues. Let me know if this helps (or if it doesn't).
One other thing to note: when putting in the URLs to the Organization & ISP databases, make sure the 'date=...' part of the URL isn't present. If they are there, the latest version of the database won't be downloaded. (They are in the links MaxMind provides, so it can easy to overlook them.)
I think the issue you were experiencing in your first post (where leaving ISP/Organization blank results in nothing happening) is a UI bug. If the databases you're setting links for already exist, the links are updated, but the 'Done' message doesn't display. You can fix that by replacing the ./piwik/plugins/UserCountry/Controller.php file with https://raw.github.com/piwik/piwik/1.X/plugins/UserCountry/Controller.php. Also, replace the ./piwik/plugins/UserCountry/GeoIPAutoUpdater.php file with https://raw.github.com/piwik/piwik/1.X/plugins/UserCountry/GeoIPAutoUpdater.php as I fixed another bug while looking into your issue.
The second issue could be caused by a lot of things. My guess, though, is that it took too long to download the file and the browser decided to stop waiting. We were aware of this issue when building the feature, so Piwik will actually try and download the file piece by piece. Unfortunately, Maxmind's servers don't allow doing this.
If you only care about the location database and/or ISP database, you shouldn't encounter any issues. Let me know if this helps (or if it doesn't).
One other thing to note: when putting in the URLs to the Organization & ISP databases, make sure the 'date=...' part of the URL isn't present. If they are there, the latest version of the database won't be downloaded. (They are in the links MaxMind provides, so it can easy to overlook them.)