Testing Microsoft Visual Studio Express

I've volunteered to do a small project involving webcam access for an artist friend of mine and I decided that the easiest way to get an app up and running for a windows machine that could do everything that I needed would be to use MS visual studio express, as it is free and will work directly with the windows API. Brilliant.

Except that it doesn't work.

Sadly I can download the installers, but when they're downloading the things to be installed they just hang and die.

So far, I'm not impressed!