Impossible to reinstall Mountain Lion on Macbook Air

Hi! Recently my mid 2011 air started crashing safari and then firefox. As per the forums I deleted add-ons and made sure that the latest software was downloaded from the app store. The 3 days ago the computer crashed and would not restart. It would not allow me into recovery either with an icon and contact apple support (World symbol with a warning ! and apple.com/support - 6002F). So...I installed 10.8.3 on a 1TB extenal hard drive and downloaded the installer program also (using my old Macbook pro). I then used this as a boot disk for the Air which was fine and I was able to then erase the Air's hard drive reformat (uncludind reducing the size of the main partition by a couple of gigs - as a support blog recommened. Then I was able to use the restore function form the external hard drive to try and do a web based reinstall of 10.8.3 - alas it spent 40mins downloading and then when I tried to install the OS it said it was corrupted and so I repeated that 3 more times to no avail (def of stupidity). Next I tried using the ext boot to load up and then downloaded 10.8.3 from the app store and then install it on my clean SSD (I had made sure that the disk did not need to be repaired) . Nope no joy here again an eternity download it and then the installation but at the end it just did not complete the install with some rediculous time to complete of 36hrs...eventually getting to 55mins then hung indefinitely. Having done this a few times with the same result I tried downloading a new 10.8.3 from the app store (while the computer was runing of the external boot drive) same result installation could be not completed.
Next I trieved my dusty snow leopard installation disk from a drawer and tried to use an external DVD drive to install this old OS with the hope that I could update later. Nope! Without the boot HD attached: the computer would not detect the ext drive...on restarts I pressed c button I held the alt button down - nothing the drive would fire up (PS I had checked the drive and disk worked on my MacBook and it did) and then shut down and the computer reverted to a grey screen with a pretty white apple logo! Next I tried booting up with the ext hard drive and installing snow leopard to the clean SSD - nope apple says no - you're not allowed do that while running snow lion as a boot disk! I'm 2 days at this now! I live in Ireland so there are no "genius" bars - in case that is a suggestion.
Currently I'm copying the contents of the Snow leopard disk to my clean SSD drive (having booted in Mountain Lion) for a hoot to see if the computer may boot directly from its own hard drive - I doubt this but I'm getting desperate. When that doesn't work my final throw will be to erase the ext hard drive and try install Snow leopard on it and use that as the boot drive then maybe Mr Apple will allow me to install Snow Leopard on the SSD!?
Someone please help!

OK last evenings efforts were futile!
Thanks for the replies but as I said there is no apple store with in Ireland with a guru bar (whole country!) therefore not an option! Using my boot disk I can get into recovery and it will allow me to download M/L (again for 30-40mins) then it will not install it properly! I have tried some other options today including deleting the app store cache with the reg command: open $TMPDIR../C/ - didn't help my "This Copy of the Install OS X Mountain Lion Application can’t be verified". I just can not understand why it will not just let me reinstall software I have paid for on a computer I have bought...especially as it allowed me to creat a boot disk with that same software (which I am now using to type this!).
ANy further help would be hugely appreciated.
Thanks

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