I’ve been systematically removing MSIE (and the security hole it represents) for many, many years — since Windows 98 started forcing the “Active Desktop” BS.

Just go here, and get it free:

http://litepc.com/

WINE (W.ine I.s N.ot an E.mulator)
==============================
Some people mean by that that Wine must emulate each processor instruction of the Windows application. This is plain wrong. As Wine’s name says: “Wine Is Not an Emulator”: Wine does not emulate the Intel x86 processor. It will thus not be as slow as Wabi which, since it is not running on a x86 Intel processor, also has to emulate the processor. Windows applications that do not make system calls will run just as fast as on Windows (no more no less).

http://www.winehq.com/site/myths

TT

Several layers of obscuration and undocumented features
make it near impossible to tell what you have on your computer.
Much less which version of what libraries.
You have executables and dlls and registry information all over.

There’s no way to tell what does what and how.
When you uninstall software some things remain.

Even if you try to remove IE it is near impossible to remove everything
since windows depends on IE components to run.

Windows is a nightmare of cataclysmic proportion.
The worst thing is that you get used to it.

I can’t wait to find a linux desktop manager that feels right.
And for windows apps, there’s always wine (windows emulator).
I bet the emulator works better than windows already…