Hi,
I've already contacted Blizzard Support on this but I haven't really gotten good results thus far.
Here is the deal:
#1) I login to my Blizzard account and grab the downloader for Starcraft.
#2) I run it and it finishes downloading Starcraft.
#3) I use the installer to install Starcraft.
#4) I attempt to patch the 1.15.2 installation with the Brood War 1.161 Upgrade Patch.
It fails:
I've tried this on three different, no wait, four different systems and it failed on each one of them.
What does work:
#1) Installing using the completely downloaded installer
#2a) patching via Battle.net
OR
#2b) patching via the Starcraft Original 1.161 Upgrade Patch
If I install from my cds I can install either the Brood War 1.161 Upgrade Patch or the Starcraft Original 1.161 Upgrade Patch.
According to tech support the BW-1161.exe manual patcher is the one I'm supposed to be using if I didn't want to use Battle.net's update service.
Bottom line:
Can anyone else successfully patch a new digital download installation of Starcraft using the BW-1161.exe manual patcher?
Thanks in advance for your help.

Had the same problem yesterday, the broodwar patch didn't work. Also when it failed to update usinf battle.net. It downloaded the update but it didn't work.
So I had to install and patch original cd version.

Isn't there a separate installer for Brood War with the Blizzard installer thingy? I'm pretty sure it was, but I can check it out when I get home from work. You could try to uncheck (if it is checked that is) 'Read-only' in the folder properties and try to reapply the patch.
Anyway, with one of the later patches you should be able to play without any of the discs, if you just copy over a couple of files from it.

Thanks for the replies, but just to clarify:
The installation source is a folder of content downloaded from the Blizzard Account page (now it's known as your Battle.net account) using their download tool.
That folder of content is the digital download version of the Starcraft game that contains both the original game + the Broodwar expansion.
A customer can purchase this for $15 or can obtain it by registering their retail copy.
From what I saw it's a combined installer, but I'll double check. I also didn't check whether read-only was applied as I was patching immediately after installation and didn't figure their installer would do that. Good thing to check for though.

I just installed on a fresh install of XP SP3 and then I tried applying the BW-1161.exe manual patcher and it failed. I immediately turned around and was able to successfully install the SC-1161.exe manual patcher.

I submitted an error report (short because of message length constraints) at the technical support site (link points to the article named "Are you experiencing errors while patching?", though it doesn't solve anything here, let them know about it you too if you haven't already).
Also, when I patched with the normal StarCraft patcher, I couldn't connect to battle.net because it wouldn't recognise the game version - thus, if you might want to connect to battle.net later, you must patch thorough there.

I've started downloading the installer now, which will take a couple of hours, so we'll see what happens here.
By the way, have you tried redownloading the installer? Might be a corrupt file or something.

yeah it fails for me too when I do that
Apparently it fails on the checksum of StarEdit.exe, that file is probably different between the plastic-disc version and the downloaded version.
The later versions of the game no longer requires the CD to run (when various files are copied to HDD as per Blizzard's instructions in patch.txt - changes for patch 1.15.2), but I do wonder if that applies to StarEdit.exe, if that one still requires a CD, that's the difference (or the first of them) between the CD version and the downloaded one.
Haven't tried installing from CD, yet.
And I'm running Vista 64-bit, all games are installed into a non-protected folder (namely: G:\Games\).

Thanks Miaghstir, it's good to hear I'm not the only one having the problem. I'm thinking about contacting Blizzard again with the hope I'll get a different tech to respond (the last two times I contacted them I got the same guy).

Installed it now, and I have the exact same problem actually.

Hmm, now I'm confused, the installer says:
But the thing is, the checksums are exactly the same for downloaded version and for the CD version upgraded to 1.15.2 (both with and without brood war, same version number as the downloaded variant).
So, yeah, it seems the only solution to patch at the moment, before blizzard releases a fixed stand-alone patch, is to connect to battle.net.

Thanks for testing that. I was actually going to look into just that.
A week or two ago I used Process Monitor from sysinternals to watch for any failures from the BW-1161.exe patcher and it reported some odd access denied messages.
I don't have the log, but I suppose it doesn't matter as you guys have confirmed that it's just not my system(s) that are having the problem.
Thanks for the help! Now to contact Blizzard again ...