Or if there is one location with a list of freely available layers, shapefiles or geodatabases? (I am totally lost in all of ESRI's various sites and pages). Specifically, ESRI allows us to load layers in ArcGIS - for example - from the link below. But I would like to Save these layers to my local drive so I can do more advanced analysis with them. Either that, or be able to download directly from an on-line repository.
http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=302d4e6025ef41fa8d3525b7fc31963a
Humbrian