A version of IE is included with Windows, and although you can make it hard to find, you can't actually remove it completely, or much of Windows would stop working correctly. I suggest not trying to root it out completely. You might not need the ActiveX version of Flash if you do not use IE. But consider this: Some third party programs display HTML content (e.g., help and tutorials) using the hidden components of IE, and if those programs want to display Flash media, they will need the ActiveX version of Flash. So as long as it keeps itself up-to-date, I don't think there is much harm in keeping it around. As for your mail program, the free mail program included with Windows XP was Outlook Express. It can retrieve mail from a wide variety of service providers and is pretty widely understood and supported. I'm not sure you want to lock yourself in to one particular provider's email program that might be harder to migrate to your next computer...