Hi, just had a situation when i started a new fuelphp (1.7.2) project by downloading it from (http://fuelphp.com/downloads), but had issues launching composer.phar install commandu, because found out that composer.json doesn't have the default included pacakges writen down as it does with fuelphp 1.7.1 version. After adding manualy the dependencies everyhting worked.
By friend next to my tried downloading fuelphp from the git repo which had fixed the issue. So its just a matter of updating zip file on the (http://fuelphp.com/downloads) site.
It's still not fixed. The package you download with the download link is broken because of the included composer.json file. Use the github 1.7/master branch repository download as zip link instead.