to download WoW and all the patches your looking at about 6-8 hours ish depending on your computer
you can buy a hard copy of the game in any good game shop but you will still need to download patches and updates.
Yes you have to download the whole game and its patches before you can upgrade to the Burning Crusade.
The client will automatically download each patch that you are missing in succession. This could be a few, or a lot if you haven't played in a while.
No, World of Warcraft is not on Steam. If you want to download it, got the the official World of Warcraft site to download it.
that depends on wen u start playing it and how many patches the blizzard ppl have made u need ALL the patches installed/download in order to play WoW
World of Warcraft will always download patches automatically. There is no way around it. You can always use the background downloader to pre-download large patches ahead of time, but this does not always work as sometimes patches are released really fast to fix a bug in the code.
Depending on what version of World of Warcraft you are starting to patch from, it should take no longer than a few hours (depending on your internet speed and internet congestion). The part that might take the longest is actually installing the patches. This can take a while, depending on your computer's speed.
For world of warcraft, all patches are applied automatically, you can not stop it. if you stop the client, then the client does not get updated and you can not use it to play. world of warcraft has an automatic updater, you do not need to do anything besides letting it run.
If you do not have the install disc for World of Warcraft, then yes, you have to download it and let it update to the current version.
There are only a few official sites that are available to download the patches from if you do not want to use the downloader. See the related links section below for a blizzard support page listing them. Please note: some smaller patches (quick bug fixes) are only available through the downloader.
Glider is banned from World of Warcraft. It will not work.