OS Recovery Tool, yet another user with the same problem, "Verifying Image"

I've seen multiple posts with this issue, not resolution, at least not in the ones I've seen.

Disk failure on Latitude E6420. Had a very old image on a drive, figured I'd get that working and just do a recovery install, get rid of old stuff.  Installed OS recovery tool, downloaded the relevant image (Win 7 Pro 16bit). Recovery Tool hung verifying the image. Went to a completely different Win 10 system, installed the recovery tool, downloaded the correct image for the 6420, same issue, hung "Verifying image"..

I've seen MANY posts with this same issue on various sites. One person said he clicked around the bar at random after an hour and that seemed to make it finish. I saw a couple posts where Dell support asked the person to contact Dell support, which doesn't help me much at all because my warranty is over and I see no reason to pay another $75 or $150 to get an OS for this laptop when there's obviously a problem with the vendor's software.