Ok, well that clears things up for me re navigation
charts. As I said, someone informed me the NGA kept high resolution (45mb images) which showed navigational routes, wind statistics, and a lat+long grid which one could navigate on. This was after I told him I was going to spend $90 on gnomic
charts for the South Atlantic. Clearly I was excited about the prospect of spending that $90 on something else... However, you seem to have burst that myth - I was somewhat suspect myself.
As for the NGA. Well, that seems like pretty childish behaviour - Intentionally making things difficult. In fact, packaging up PDF's in .exe's would be more work for the agency... If they had any sense at all, they'd simply dump everything in a public FTP folder, and let the public scavenge the bits without complex drop down menus, installers and other oddities. This would be far simpler for everyone concerned.
nick