Try adding admin rights to the downloader. If it doesn't work try downloading via the browser instead.

That won't help, the problem is that gogdownloader addresses aren't being forwarded correctly on his system, either due to the Downloader not being installed or the browser having the wrong setting for it.

booooo hissss

The new Downloader has an installer.

Installers are saved to a folder in My Documents by default; again, permissions are not the issue here.

I started using Windows 8 and noticed that on the start screen with all the installed programs (not the first screen with your chosen favorites etc), arranged by name, many of the main gog game shortcuts are dumped in the first generic location rather than under the game's specific folder which only shows the misc shortcuts (also the game folders are marked with the name followed by [GOG.com] which sucks).

In the pics below showing the whole of my start screen you can see that Freespace 2's shortcut is properly under its own folder area while other games like Wing Commander have their shortcuts dumped in the first section alongside other random stuff (and duplicated under the games list but ignore that for now, that's Microsoft's fault for not removing that crappy feature). I thought it might be that only DOS games have the issue but that's not why as Independence War 2 and the last Wing Commander games aren't DOS games.

I've found no way to reliably make Windows 8 show this list the way I want to by making changes to the program data\start menu\ etc folders either, which sucks (such changes were really easy in the old start menu) that's why I'm posting this hoping for a fix (or a manual solution).

I know about pinning favorites and what not, I just want this screen fixed too.

The non-categorised games are because some GOG installers make shortcuts in the Start Menu's base folder (%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs). Windows doesn't show the shortcuts twice because of this.

If you want the shortcuts to only show up under the folder sections you can move them to the individual folders (in %PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs), replacing existing files when prompted. Those game shortcuts will then only be shown under the folder categories in the apps view.

Thanks, that worked after all, I thought I had tried it. Actually I did, to dump some of the other uncategorised Windows features under Administrative Tools instead, as seen in that image. But making a new folder and sticking another shortcut in there didn't work, it won't show up. I also can't rename the folders to remove the [GOG.com] thing from gog game folders. I mean, I remove it but the change doesn't apply to the start screen which causes launching to not function from there. I must have done that last time too, which is why I thought I can't manipulate that at all as it didn't work. Is that impossible to circumvent? Isn't there some registry value for the paths to change?

Edit: well, I managed to create a new folder and rename others after all, the changes seem to stall to take effect, I guess it keeps some things in memory rather than fetch them every time, it's hard to know what does and doesn't work this way, although one of the shortcuts I had moved to a different folder no longer seems to be detected to be shown in the start screen. Oh well, I'll figure it out...