we just ran into an issue where maven suddenly did not work on a computer and the build failed with messages like:
>Reason: Unable to download the artifact from any repository

it took us quite a while to find out that downloading succeeded, but the real problem was, that maven failed to write to the local repository in our case the local repository resides somewhere on the C: drive, but the directory is mapped to a virtual drive (using the windows SUBST
command) - the developer just forgot to mount this virtual dirve at startup - which lead to the problem described above. 

I think maven should improve the errormessage in this case

maybe this post will help someone else:
or even myself, because by next week I'll aready have forgotten about this again