The goal: Install Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 on two computers, only one of which is connected to the Internet. Ideally, I'd download everything I need for the second computer and write that to a CD-R. When you go to the download page for IE, what you get is ie6setup.exe . Just a small (by Microsoft standards) installation program that figures out what you need and retrieves those components from the net. For computers directly connected to the net, this is ideal. Supposedly, in order to download an offline copy (or network install, as they call it) of Internet Explorer, which is about 45 MB, you need to choose the Custom or Minimal Install and then set it to Download Only. I made a mistake. On the first computer, I picked the normal install and the program proceeded to retrieve all the components and update it to IE6 SP1. So now I'm stuck. I need to use the ie6setup program to download IE6 but when I run it, it checks the version of IE on the computer, concludes that IE is already up-to-date and terminates without offering the Download option! First, I took a look at ie6setup /? . A few options. None looked too promising. I ran: ie6setup /t:c:\download\ie6 /c to unpack the archive. Saw that there was an ie6wzd.exe program in there so I tried running ie6wzd /? . No dice. That didn't show any command line option help. That just started up the IE6 setup wizard as usual. It started, checked the version of IE, and bailed out. Googled around on the web for a while. I found some information on the command line switches at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/ie/reskit/ie5/part6/appxccmd.asp which is part of Microsoft Technet. So the command I needed was: ie6wzd /d:1 and that finally did the trick and downloaded everything. What's exasperating about this is the way an apparently harmless mistake can turn a simple task into something that requires web research. Why couldn't they put the Download Only option up front in ie6setup? Who designed the IE6 setup wizard anyway? Microsoft? Oh wait, it was Microsoft. Never mind.