Not exactly something that happens all the time but I had a run away process on my machine that ate up alot of log space, and kaboom - out of space, but then stuck/abort doesn't above and task manager/kill was my only option. So it's resolvable just not pretty.
Sounds like you were downloading to the Windows drive. When it gets to low on resources it won't run properly, not an AS issue but a win resource one. It's best to be downloading on an external HDD or separate partition in case that happens and you will find abort should work just fine. Yea you can always just go to task manager and kill AS.
