Well it was most likely never, at any point, completely bug-free, and many
bugs, especially of the Windows interface, have been left there forever.

What's worse, the project is largely dead.

I was very surprised when I found a couple of messages from the author less
than 2 years old (https://forum.httrack.com/readmsg/37737/37729/index.html,
<https://forum.httrack.com/readmsg/37972/37971/index.html>); I had become
convinced that something happened to him, instead it looks like he's even
still monitoring the forum, and responding to notices of antivirus reports,
expired certificates or...well, that's all :)

But for some reason he silently gave up on the project, and maybe he's just
mulling whether or not to take the whole site down (which would be very
ironic).

But the software did kind of work (at least on past versions of Windows), it
was just very complex to use and required a lot of tinkering in most cases.
In a lot of cases it's just impossible to make it do what you want, this
software has a "web engine" that was approximative and rough fifteen years
ago, a lot has changed since and the web has gone in a direction ever more
hostile to mirroring and being off-line.

And it has a lot of bugs that have never been fixed because the author was not
interested enough (it was just a hobby project), or were just too complex.

And it has very bad documentation.

And an horrible forum, that doesn't support notifications, has poor search
functionality, doesn't get indexed well by search engines, makes it hard to
understand that no one is still following it or what you should use it for and
puts together serious bug reports, requests from people who haven't even tried
to understand how it works and specific mirroring requests when figuring out
how to make the software do what you want with a certain site is *always* hard
and time-consuming, even for the most expert users, and very often results in
being impossible because of limitations or bugs in the software or sites just
too hard, or impossible, to copy.

Some years ago there were a couple of users that actively interacted and
sometimes tried to help with the ones who posted, but they are long gone.

So a lot of problems but unfortunately maybe still the least worst, and so a
lot of people still trying to use it.

Personally I have largely stopped using it for several years (probably after
some horrible experience with something that linked to Wikipedia), the other
day I tried to update a mirror, had a look at the state of project, and
decided to scour the forum to figure out if anyone had reported what happened
or when the author last spoke.

In the process I replied to a couple of posts, but don't expect anything more,
I wasted a couple of days but now I want to forget about this software again;
I'm only a (past) user, by the way.

---

Anyway, for your specific message the 'show your command line' is relevant
even if you use the GUI version, it kind of uses the command line version
under the hood and stores the command it used at the beginning of the
hts-log.txt file, in the project's directory.
This was regularly explained on the forum ten years ago (but 'show your
command line' was rather rough even back then, admittedly).

And for the specific problems, I don't remeber much anymore, but yeah I seem
to recall that you couldn't hope to make it work with an external links
setting different from 0 (or it was at least very difficult), and maybe there
was some bug with the active connections and the bandwidth too (but this might
well have to do with the servers).

If you try a lot (stopping and trying with different settings as soon as
things start go awry), and maybe scour the various documentation (the less
worse documentation seems to be at <http://httrack.kauler.com>, for whatever
reason) and the forums, you often can manage to get you want, but often not.
In some cases you can manage to have it finish downloading most of what you
need, and can just terminate it, even it wanted to continue downloading the
rest of the internet (or at least the whole of Wikipedia); in other cases
not.

Ah, a good advice is probably to normally leave set "Do not purge old files"
and to remove the default "+*.png +*.gif +*.jpg +*.css +*.js" (you can save,
load and set as default the options from the Preferences menu - if you ever
were to load options beware that for a bug doing so also changes the path and
name of the project in the first screen).
And to make copies of the project before you resume or update one.

---

So, if you really need it, you can try, but you have to expect a lot of effort
and most off all be ready to give up early, as in many cases it's just
impossible, or too hard.

---

Oh, and the software hasn't been updated or seriously followed for several
years, in all likelyhood it is filled with vulnerabilities, which can be a
very bad thing for a software that tends to look at every whatsoever link it
runs into.