Return of Reckoning

I downloaded the torrent and placed it on my desktop, I unchecked read only for the entire file and allowed the launcher and war-64.exe through my firewall and ran as administrator but it still wants to download war.exe(about 762 files) after the manifest and varifying have finished. Previously, after trying to download the war.exe file it wanted to download 17k files but that was before I did a few extra steps(unchecking read only etc.) Is it normal for the launcher to want to download the war.exe file if done correctly(the762 files)?

Yes. The number of files is fine. Some people have to download 17k files after first install for whatever reasons. You only screwed up if the number is higher than 170k.