Whenever I've done a major system reinstall (one in the last few days, actually) I've invariably needed IE5.5 SP2 again and, like you, have needed to download it. And, again, like you, I've wondered if there's a way to download it to the Desktop, so as to later put it on a CD. However, IE5.5 SP2 download seems to consist of just a 400KB installer followed by IE5.5 itself and it installs immediately, preventing you from getting at it separately.
 
I'll be watching this space to see if someone's found a way of getting it on to the Desktop before installing.

http://www.petri.co.il/download_the_full_ie_package.htm

Cheers!

Alas, I may have jumped the gun a little, it would seem that is the full package + the service pack, I really only need the SP in this case, the "engineers" around here at work use registry hacks to enforce security policies, if I do a reinstall of the whole thing, there could be trouble...

Didnt know there was just a way to extract and package SPs for all the different versions of IE.
 
I always believed that using IEAK was the best way to customize and build standardized versions of IE.

i think i have it home. i will check tonight and if i have it i will send it to you with mail or ftp.

Hi CatDog,
First off don't accept a copy of IE from any URL, except Microsoft. There's no need to take that risk, MS has an incredibly fast connection so why fool around any where else? Start the little installer and choose download rather than install. It'll download all the files to a directory and away you go. Unless they changed that in 5.5, but all previous versions made it a visible option right at the start of the installation.
-Christian

Some sound advice from Christian. But since you already have the full package, you can just run the installer. It should only update the SPx files.

Indeed - thats what I ended up doing. It didn't fix the damn problem though. Grrr. Check out the Win9x forum, maybe you guys can help me with the original problem.
 
Cheers all.

As a follow-up, I personally have been known to distribuite MSFT files, such as ACT 1.5... However, there are two important factors here: 1. The file is not available from Microsoft, and 2. The file has a valid MSFT digital signature, verified by Verisign.

Hi Guys,
I too distribute a little bit of MS Software that is also not comercially available nor was it ever. It's a Dos based console application that saves Fat12,16, and 32 partitions. However, it can't restore if you resized the destination partition. It is however wonderful for saving floppies which is what I use it for regulary.
To Save a Windows Entertainment Pack 3 Floppy I typed:
RawRead A: WEP3.img /a /b /c /v
/a - saves only allocated clusters
/b - checks for bad clusters
/c - compressed
/v - verifies
 
To Restore the floppy image you'd type:
Rawwrite Wep3.img A: /v
/V - verfies
 
All switches are case insensitive. To get a copy of Rawread just download this zip and extract it's contents into your path or the folder you want to save images to.
 
Adios Amigos,
Christian