thanks for the vpn info, i will try it tonight after work.
my question is do you need the vpn just to upgrade, or do you need to keep it on to play?

For all Chinese users only solution is VPN. I tried everything before.My VPN is always on but normally been used for browsing only,you will have to adjust your VPN settings and switch to complete invisibility in order to be able to update(at least thats how my software works).
You dont need on for playing afterwards

I know this thread is fairly old, but I had the issue recently, and I figured out why it was happening (to me at least). There is an internet filter on my computer which for some reason blocked the site l3cdn.riotgames.com by default (its where some patch data is downloaded from). All I had to do was allow that web site in the filter and it worked fine. This would also explain why VPN would allow download, since they will get around a lot of internet filters. So if you have some type of filter on your computer - Sonic Wall, Covenant Eyes, Net Nanny, etc. try to look into temporarily deactivating it or figuring out which site it is blocking and allow it.