Even a best friend can unintentionally pass along a virus, trojan, or worm. Besides, we have no way to determine the level of virus protection you employ in your own computer use. A file does not have to be an exe to contain a problem. Many years ago, everyone I worked with managed to contract the Word Macro bug simply by sharing .doc files. (I can't remember now what exactly it did, but it was sure hard to eradicate it with everyone passing it around)
So you shouldn't take it personally if anyone is afraid to download something in order to answer your question. It isn't about you being a newbie or regular or whatever on this forum. It's about being cautious in clicking on links and/or downloading files that we don't actually want ourselves just to answer a question that we may not care about having an answer to. I've tossed a lot of FWD FWD FWD messages with attachments even from some of my good friends, especially when they don't add anything to the body of the text so I know it wasn't just a virus mailing itself to everyone in their address book.
I (and I'm sure many others here) would much prefer to be paranoid than risk infection over something relatively unimportant to us. The risk may be low, but the potential damage is significant and hardly worth it.