Doesn't matter - whatever option I pick, technic, tekkit (when it was still there) or vanilla - the launcher fails very early in the download of minecraft.jar
EDIT:
However, I just tried clearing out my .minecraft folder and forcing a download of the vanilla client, and its stalling on this as well, so that suggests a problem over at the MC.net servers, doesn't it? (And sorry if someone identified this in another thread, I find it very hard to keep up with all of them)