Comment 56 for bug 1371783

I've pulled the package apart because I wasn't having much luck with any of the workarounds here. The issue seems to stem from the fact that Sourceforge redirects to another URL to force the use of a mirror. Because it appears that libcurl isn't maintaining cookies between requests, the download of each font is subject to a potential change of mirror. This seems to confuse the process and ends up with a combination of spurious errors such as HTTP range checks, HTTPS not being compiled in, and hash mismatches. From what I can see, if a cookie could be maintained between requests, this would potentially solve the issue. Potentially.

The solution which ultimately worked for me was to pull the following file out of the deb archive...

   /usr/share/package-data-downloads/ttf-mscorefonts-installer

...and bypass the Sourceforge address completely. For example, change the andale32.exe URL to the following:

http://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/downloads.sourceforge.net/c/co/corefonts/the fonts/final/andale32.exe

Once the deb was rebuilt, the installation worked consistently every time. Clearly, this is a bodge which works for me in my location but it does appear to prove where the issue is.