You are right; the preferred way is to have IE7 installed with the official installer. That is exactly what i have on my main development PC. IE7 installed using the official Installer and the other obsolete browsers in standalone.

This article is for people who do not have IE7 installed and want to run it in standalone mode without having to install it.

The first sentence of this article basically tries to say that if you already have IE7 installed then ignore this article and read my other article (here). That other article has an installer for the standalone versions of Internet Explorer (6, 5.5, 5, 4, & 3) which you should try out instead of this one.

Was the language in the first sentence of this article not clear enough? If so I apologize, obviously English is not my first language.