When I was told that we were looking to download 500+ documents from our corporate intranet which runs on SharePoint my instant reaction was that we should throw out some custom code to fetch files from the SharePoint web-services.
But then, why write code when you can do the same thing, just as fast, without writing any code? Don't get me wrong. I mean, I'm all for writing code, but if there's a tool out there that will save a few hours of my life and fix a problem, without my having to write any code, I don't really have a problem with that either! :)
Here is an account of how I managed to grab and download some 500+ documents from a SharePoint 2003 Document Repository without writing a single line of code.