Hmm. It's been a while, so my memory's a little foggy. I think that happened to me a few times. The bar would load up to 100% and still fail the first time, but repeating either load or save worked. (ie it said it failed the first time, but would save the image if you either re downloaded the code or just went ahead and saved (or a combination of both, it seemed pretty temperamental).
Sorry to be so vague. I'll let you know if I remember anything else of use.
Does other code work with your board? (ie can you program the board via quartus?) I've heard of issues with the USB blaster / unsigned drivers in windows vista, but not sure if it would cause the 1h issue or not.