You may recall an email circulating suggesting that Bill Gates is the antichrist and that someone dispelled this theory. I have new proof, starting with IE.
One time, I used nLite to remove IE from setup. For 3 weeks, you couldn't tell the difference. After 3 weeks, Windows went insane! It slowed down suspiciously and freezed every time I went on the network. This wasn't the usual just-close-the-program type of freeze, it was a core system freeze, total lockup. Now, you may think I just downloaded some kind of spyware or a virus during that time as I thought, but after installing IE, Windows reverted to normal. Bill Gates forces you to have IE, therefore it is only common logic that there is a reason. Now that the theory that IE is integrated into Windows has been dispelled, what kind of theories will come up. Either Bill actually just wants to crush competition, or he's plotting something.
Alexia
Ever heard of Alexia. It's a hidden component of Windows that spies on you.
Temporary files
IE has an internet cache. This is normal as most browsers do. However, what is not normal is that IE keeps cache long after you've told it to delete it. Though the Temporary Internet Files folder may actually be cleaned out, did you know that it and the history folder is hidden in command prompt unless you have actually been there before in cmd? My guess on this is that if you start XP in safe mode with command prompt where nothing else is running you could delete Bill's 007s in these folders. There are two files, both named 'index.dat'. Most people just wonder at what is in there and why Windows won't let them open it. Open these files in notepad or wordpad, and you get your browsing history since you installed Windows, even if you told it to clear that kind of crap. Another thing is the registry key,
HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/TypedURLs/, that records your typed urls even after you've cleared temp
files