Definitely sounds like it could be real. If I had to guess their mounting a drive (or another partition) and it’s defaulting to read only. When restarting it resets the original permissions as they only updated the file permissions, but not the mount configuration.
Also reads like some of my frustrations when first getting into Linux (and the issues I occasionally run into still).
The download feature is always in some state of broken, but it has gotten a lot better over the past couple of years. If you haven’t tried it in a year or so, you may have better luck now.