it is very possible to get rid of Internet Explorer without doing something stupid (like using linux or mac), and XPLite is the magic software that allows it to happen. It gets rid of not just the executable, but the IE HTML rendering engine that windows uses uses in so many stupid ways.
You'd think that with all the propaganda that MS puts out, that the system would crash and burn without IE... But it's not true at all. All programs that usually embed web content (which was usually useless anyway) using IE now show a dialog prompting me to open firefox. It is counterintuitive that it would work so well.
My system is a bit faster than it used to be before using XPLite, but I'm not sure if it's because IE is gone or if it's the tons of other things that this software got rid of the MS never gave you the option for.