Les, Braam,
I won't comment in detail on this, yet even though these posts contain internal links that we haven't made public I won't delete them from the forum either. I'll only say that we reserve the right to change or remove such non-public URLs in the future.
The background of all these changes is that we're modifying some part of the backend infrastructure for downloads - one of the benefits is higher available bandwidth and better tracking of download numbers of us internally. At this point, the Xandros ESD infrastructure we're using for this provides for a number of benefits out of the box, i.e. without any new stuff we have to build, so we're using it. Unfortunately, support for direct wget downloads is not one of them and to re-enable that officially, we would have to make changes again and I'm simply not sure if that's money well spent on our side.
So - while I'm looking into the topic of email-less downloads still - as mentioned below - I'll have to ask that you accept the new setup, even though it may cause minor inconveniences in some situations; the scheme we're following is used elsewhere in the industry and should be workable for most situations. And if I really need to do an onsite setup, I usually carry a USB stick with the files around with me anyway.
Sorry to not be of much more help here, but hope it works for you anyway.
Florian