Get a standalone version of Windows Live Essentials

Windows live has some pretty nifty tools, like Live writer which is one of the best blogging tools that I've come across. I recently tried to upgrade from my previous beta version of Writer to a new one at http://download.live.com/.

I can’t figure out this fixation for web installers everywhere. First you download an installer which in turn will download more stuff. This is an obvious problem if you want to run the installer on a computer that’s offline (yes, that does happen in this day and age!!).  It is also a major problem if the web installer croaks and complains that there isn’t an internet connection when there evidently is.  You get stuck with this unhelpful error:

OnCatalogResult: 0x80072ee6

There are some suggestions given here, but they didn’t work for me. The only way to get it working was to download a standalone version. When you click the download link on the main page you’re redirected to a page and also get the prompt to download the web installer (something like http://download.microsoft.com/download/E/B/7/EB7AAFE7-514F-495A-A981-99830FE8E99E/en/wlsetup-web.exe). You can choose to cancel this prompt and press “Try Again” on the same page to download the full standalone version. Or even simply rename the above link to wlsetup-all.exe instead of wlsetup-web.exe. The file size is a lot bigger, but it works!