Hmmm. It definately sounds interesting (btw – I’m not in the US). It sounds like the connection is getting overloaded somehow, which might be connected with the recent outages that Gmail has been having.
When you say that it cannot download – does the download window show any errors? If so, what exactly do they say?
I’ve been using Outlook connected to Gmail for years, and I don’t think that I’ve ever come across this happening for me (or for anyone that I know…)