Possibly of relevance to a few people here (especially outside the US). A few months ago the USGS made some substantial changes to their data download that have made their downloads a) faster and b) more reliable. My data downloading had slowed for a while as I could only successfullly download data for a couple of hours a day which was a real pain (60Mb data tiles would crash at 90%+) but it's now working beautifully 24 hours a day. The queues occasionally get a little long but the downloads rarely crash and there's a now a link to retry the download for an hour if it does.
Filled my new hard disk... got an extra 1Tb now :) Some more terrains will be coming in the near future.
Thanks. One of the reasons I quit trying there months ago was the length of time for a download and I don't remember the site being especially easy to figure out. It might have just been me on that.
I had practically given up as well at one stage. As for ease of use... I just use a bookmarked URL for a query and then edit the coordinates. I download 1°x1° chunks of 10m data using a url like: http://extract.cr.usgs.gov/Website/distreq/RequestSummary.jsp?AL=42,41,-117,-118&PL=ND301HZ, (http://extract.cr.usgs.gov/Website/distreq/RequestSummary.jsp?AL=42,41,-117,-118&PL=ND301HZ,)
The coordinates of the edges are in "AL=42,41,-117,-118"
Excellent info. Done.