@djarrett thank you for this information. I do not see an immediate problem I would suggest to try these options. Switch the internal storage from snappy in the knime.ini to
-Dknime.compress.io=GZIP
-Dknime.compress.io=NONE
there are some error messages about the storage format in the LOG. Just an idea.
Then just to be sure - could you try to download the PDF file into a location provided by a path variable or relative path (instead of a c:\xyz path):
Next thing to try would be to use deprecated nodes and see if that does make a difference. That could give the KNIME developers an idea that it is an issue with the transfer node. You might find examples about their usage attached below the nodes description: