I just learned, a little too late, that all versions of TurboTax 2001 install Internet Explorer 5.5 as part of the program setup. There is no warning of this, and the TurboTax installation program gives you no choice.

Quicken, the maker of TurboTax, says this is harmless, because you can uninstall IE5.5 when you get done with your taxes.

If you are using some other web program, you can probably uninstall. If you were using another version of IE, it ain't necessarily so.

Microsoft knowledge base instructions for the IE5.5 uninstall are explicit that you cannot restore the previous version of IE unless the uninstall information for the previous version is still on your machine.

Additionally, after you uninstall and restore the previous version, you will have to reinstall security upgrades. (IE5.01 SP2 took me 5 hours to get downloaded and installed recently. It's quite large.)

The Intuit/Quicken/TurboTax installation of IE5.5 broke both our internet connections and email accounts - requiring 4 separate calls to providers to reset one account.

To add insult to injury, the IE5.5 the program installed doesn't even contain current Microsoft IE5.5 security fixes.

I could mention how happy I am with this, but there might be children present.

John