No, I am not using any proxies. I can access Github and download esp-idf from the machine. The machine I encountered the problem has win 10 OS installed, and it has an old version of esp-idf installed which I have uninstalled.
Anyway, I installed the same esp-idf vscode extension on another machine ...

Hi,

I installed the 1.10.2 esp-idf extension for vscode. After the installation, I ran "Configure ESP-IDF Extension" in vscode. I got the following output:

Downloading from https://dl.espressif.com/dl/esp-idf/idf_versions.txt
idf_versions.txt has (1) KB
idf_versions.txt progress: 100.00% (0.12 / 0 ...