Is there a way to download older versions of Visual C++ Express. I'm particularly interested in Visual C++ 2005 Express (PRIOR SP1) and Visual C++ Toolkit 2003. I tried googling for them, but all the sites linked to microsoft.com, from where microsoft (for some reason) has taken them down.
I would really appreciate if some could help me out with this.
There is no good reason to run 2005 before SP1, you do realize 2005 /w SP1 compiled code will run the same for the end user, they don't need to install a .NET SP to run the code.
The SP fixes bugs, security holes and various improvements, virtually no functionality changes, you only loose by not using /w the latest SP.
From my personal experience the software compiled with SP1 doesn't simply work, if the end user hasn't installed the redistributables. Without SP1 however it is possible to get the .exe working if you distribute it with the required .dlls.
Microsoft owns it. If they don't have a link anymore, I think you're out of luck.
I'll bet their web crawlers automatically page their lawyers if they ever find a copy on the web.
If you want to link your application against the RTM (pre-SP1) version of the CRT (C runtime), you can apparently do that by defining _USE_RTM_VERSION in your project or on the compiler command line.
Also, deploying the CRT as a private assembly should still work with the SP1 version of the CRT. If that is what you have tried to do, posting more information about what went wrong might help you find a solution.
I also put this in a comment above, but just to make sure you don't miss it: if you're trying to do this because you're having problems with deployment and different versions of dll's, have a look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/59635/app-does-not-run-with-vs-2008-sp1-dlls-previous-version-works-with-rtm-versions#70808.