I recently had to upgrade to .NET 3.5 from version 2.0.
The download size was 60MB. That's huge -- and that's just the size of the upgrade. If I wanted to download the full version of .NET 3.5 the size would be nearly 200MB. Holy smokes!
After the download completed, the installation process took a little over 5 minutes... a relatively long period of time for a software installation.
I think that the .NET Framework is an excellent idea (though I think it'd be cooler if implemented as a natively-executing C/C++ library) and from what I hear and read it makes programming much easier for the developer, but why does it have to be so large, and why must the installation process take so long?
I think users still appreciate small downloads, fast installations, and quick application start times.