Stilly River Sage -

I don't recall which system you're using, but in WinXP (and I believe in Win2K) when you get the "file in use" thing trying to delete something, you can Ctl-Alt-Del to bring up Task Manager and select the "Processes" tab. You should be able to "end process" on the thing you want to delete, and then immediately use WinExplorer to delete it.

For older systems, if you can get a good i.d. on the file, you can usually reboot to DOS and delete there, if you're sufficiently handy with simple DOS commands.

A lot of this crud puts itself in the Start/Startup folders so that it turns on every time you start Windows. Sometimes just removing it from startup (which you can usually do, since the "file" in startup is usually just a shortcut to the one actually running) and then restarting Windows will let you get to it in older systems as well.

Giok - Quite a few people use Netscape, and it seems to get along with XP pretty well. You can't actually remove IE, since it's linked into a whole bunch of basic Windows functions, but you can tell it not to be your web browser and it shouldn't complain about it.

John