Hi Kevin,
I asked a friend to actually understands http to take a look. His analysis is that cruciverb.com only allows puzzle downloading when the referer (the page holding the puzzle link) is inside cruciverb.com. He was able to download puzzles from outside the site by forging the referer, but you can't do that with an ordinary link in a browser. This is a preference that you've set (or inherited) in your web server configuration. If you meant to do that, then I'll give up on the individual puzzle links and just point people at the site. If it's accidental, it would be very nice of you to change it.
So far as I can see, the archive at latimes.com is only for the Flash puzzles. I'd really rather link to the .puz files because that's what I use myself. Am I mistaken? Is there another archive with latimes .puz files?
Thanks,
Ephraim