I am having the same problem. It just started today...my download queue is smaller than yesterday and even this morning when it worked fine. approx 4mb. I had the entire apex folder backed up on another drive. I booted that one up (vers. 1.2.1). Same problem with that one. Not sure why it started at the same time in both directories. I had the queue.xml file backed up from last night so i shut down and copied the backup to first one and tried it. Same result. Copied to the other directory and tried it with the same result.
I will admit I haven't tried waiting 5 minutes for it to load. I have shut the client down at 3 minutes of stall time when after I click on Download Queue
My downloads continue and I can adjust them by opening in the queue by opening it and saving with notepad. I just can't view them in the client