Problems opening downloads in chromium

[teachop]

No I'm using GNOME

Ok. I had this same problem, and it was caused by installing Xubuntu-destop (=XFCE, =Thunar) on top of Ubuntu back when I was not acclimated to Unity yet. Thunar brings in a package that causes this exact problem, you can read the link I posted above.

[bdoe]

The preferances are correct as the files do save to the downloads folder, the permissions for the folder is drwxr-xr-x and I have already done a removal and reinstall of chromium to try an solve this problem before

I don't believe removal of Chromium through Synaptic, Software Manager, or apt automatically removes the config folder. It might be worth verifying this though.