Help Cannot upgrade to Gingerbread with Kies!

[Megaiamepic]

Hey guys
I recently connected my phone to the computer and opened Kies. I have Samsung Galaxy Ace. It said that it had to update my phone. I clicked 'Update' and backed up my data then it said downloading firmware and reached till nearly 60% and suddenly it shows an error message:"The operation has timed out" I have tried 3 times and the same error message pops up. What can I do??
Please don't tell me to manually update the phone using Odin. I don't want to do that.
Please help
Thanks in advance
Cheers

 

[SashiX]

Could be antivirus issue. Try to turn it off during upgrade (happened to me with Kaspersky a few months ago)

 

[spinal]

Try not running anything else while updating, do nothing at all, have only Kies running and nothing else.

 

[Megaiamepic]

I tried with antivirus turned off and no applications running in the background. It finished downloading and now stuck at 0% on the next step (preparing for firmware upgrade) since an hour. Now my phone says "Downloading" in green small letters in a black background. What shall I do now?