Guest, andi & others interested

Having recently done a fairly thorough review of IE installation and removal - due to TurboTax (see here) slamming an unwanted "upgrade" without my permission, I think you will find that:

The only operating system for which Micro$oft says you cannot uninstall IE is WindowsXP (the new one). You may lose some "interoperability," but few people seem to actually use Access, Project, Word, Excell etc as their web browser.

Because IE does "overlap and intertwine" with the operating system, there are a multitude of different conditions which may occur, and which may affect how you uninstall. For best results with Windows Applications, it is recommended that you reinstall some version of IE, even if you're not intending to use it as your default browser.

Just in case you'd like to research it further - and for any others who might be interested, I've cut a list of applicable Micro$oft Knowledge Base references:

At the Micro$oft Support Knowledge Base see the following on uninstall of various versions of IE. Enter the "Q" number in the search box, and it should take you directly to any of them.

Q165646 Program Settings Lost After Internet Explorer Setup or Uninstall
Q175610 How to Manually Uninstall Internet Explorer 4.0
Q194177 Description of the Internet Explorer Repair Tool (IE5, IE5.5)
Q217344 How to Uninstall Internet Explorer 5
Q218634 Description of the "IE Setup Log.txt" File (IE5, IE5.5, IE6)
Q222564 Unable to Uninstall Internet Explorer After Windows 98 Setup
Q224412 How to Manually Uninstall Internet Explorer 4.0 for Windows NT
Q243678 How to Manually Uninstall Internet Explorer 5 for Windows 95 (IE5, IE5.01 for Win95)
Q246194 How to Uninstall Internet Explorer 5.01 (IE5.5 on Win95, Win98, Win98SE, WinNT4.0) [Why uninstall probably won't work if TurboTax slammed their IE5.5 on you]
Q257234 How to Uninstall Internet Explorer 5.5 (IE5.5 on Win95, Win98, Win98SE, Win2000, WinNT4.0)
Q263470 How to Manually Uninstall Internet Explorer 5.5 from a Computer That Is Running Windows 98 or Windows 95 (IE5.5 on Win95, Win98, Win98SE)
Q265078 Cannot Uninstall Internet Explorer After Installing Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 (Win2000 only) [Why uninstall probably won't work if TurboTax slammed their IE5.5 on you]

For Security Upgrades after any change to IE installation, see:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/security/default.asp
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/

Please ignore if you're not really that interested; but the list has been right at hand since we installed TurboTax to get our 1099s out.

John