But that does not allow me to publish apps in the app store? I have some free apps, that have a few hundred users but I don't make money from them and I am happy to provide them for free. I just don't know why I have to pay 99 USD / year for the privilege of offering free apps?! I let my program expire now users complain they can't share my app anymore, since it's no longer on the store.

I imagine these are 1GB+ in size - when I select download, it downloads at 1% of my internet speed, I measure 100KB/s. Normally I get 10MB/s. So that's 1% of my normal speed, and I guess that's why it would take a very long time, were I to wait. I always have iStat Pro running showing network activity in the menu bar. They must be hosted on a shoebox somewhere... If Apple could move these into one of its humongous data centers, that would be great.