Yeah, just download them and use WinRAR. A lot of people are confused by those, you just tell it to extract all .rar files to the same directory.

It makes sense, it's easy for them to do and it minimizes file size. If you're the one distributing them and paying at least some of the hosting it's a reasonable thing to do.

 

Agreed. An alternative is to compress with a dumb password like "123". It's what I do.