A friend of mine has been struggling with VS.NET for some time. Being new to development, she was simply overwhelmed by the amount of information available, and sifting through the mounds of data led to dead ends and frustration. Not a fun place to be, to be sure; and may even make one reconsider their vocation.
In digging for a solution, I found the Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition Beta lineup, offering express editions of our software for web, Windows client, database and Java development. Sizable downloads, but free during the beta (I do not see any expiration date in the online documentation, but I'm sure one exists).