Hello great and mighty computer geeks I went with patio and raptors advise and  installed firefox browser, seems much better by the way. went to microsoft site for directions on removing IE from my old 700mhz SYSTEMAX system,running windows 2k, I neglected to add the uninstall with the service pk 4 first time round so I just started over again and reinstalled win2k but to my surprize the IE wasn't listed in the control panel programs section, in fact it read no programs listed! I've started over from scratch on this system 4 times now because of system crashes and what not over the past 2yrs. I've reinstalled all my programs ie comodo firewall,adware,spybot etc. I did not install the msn messenger for it just brought up the IE, so I just installed my msn mail application. opened a gmail ACCOUNT, and started my yahoo messenger back up. I did not upgrade the IE from 5.01 so I can still connect to microsoft for updates. at this point the IE only opens when I connect  to microsoft. but I'm wondering if  its still messing around in my system without my knowledge, by the way I love this place, any thoughts on this matter, am I ok just leaving things the way they are now?Total removal of IE causes more pains than you would want...  It causes no problems if it's ignored...

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Good luck

There's no NEED to remove IE as it is an integral part of WIndows, without it, you can't connect to Windows Update. And some programs use it as well; do install the latest updates for it, though, because should you ever use it you really don't want to be caught with IE 5.01.Dusty and Raptor-thanks for the quick reply, cool article Dusty! and I did update 5.01 however I'll go ahead and upgrade to IE 6, as long as I dont install msn messenger It doesn't pop up. as ALWAYS thanks all for the good a straight advice, talk at ya later on the ole thinkpad with docking station a friend gave me. with no key to undock it of course Quote

as long as I dont install msn messenger It doesn't pop up.

what I ment by that is when I had the msn messenger, everytime I'd start it up my comodo personal firewall would start popping up with IE wanting to connect to the internet,sometimes 2 or 3 applications would want my ok to connect. If I denied any of them the msn messenger wouldn't open, which I why I didn't reinstall that messenger, don't need it anyway, I always used the yahoo messenger.

Is that a freeware firewall, Comodo?