I'm running Windows Vista
The path to my quake 2 world folder is:
C:\Program Files\quake2world-win32-snapshot\quake2world
I successfully downloaded the zip, extracted it to the above location, and I ran update.bat.. it seemed like everything worked and I exited when it said "press any key to continue"
Now I double clicked on the icon to start the game and a bunch of random colors come up like green, yellow, and white on a black background, there is a white bar at the very bottom... and if I type something the white bar increases size and moves to the right of my screen kinda like typing, anyway im kinda confused and dunno what to do so any help would be appreciated
What you're seeing is actually the console, but for whatever reason the game data did not complete downloading. Try running Update.bat a few times (it can't hurt to run it).
You're not the first person to see this; apparently the Cygwin rsync executable is a bit flaky. Sorry 'bout that, but it's upstream from us.
Any errors you're getting this morning are probably due to Satgnu.net (the game data server) being offline right now. I'm not exactly sure why it's down; this is atypical (first time I've ever seen it, actually).