So I pretty much know what to delete ('manually' vs. using 'internet options'), but is there some shareware around that will make it easier?  

I like to get rid of as much as possible, including that GD "content.IE5" & subfolders.

My other annoyance is those damn orbitz.com pop-ups which are about as welcome as yellow-jackets.  About all I can do is close altavista, for example, and clean out all the cookies, then they stop.  Until I need to do another search, that is.

Finally, what's the best way to beat those damn sites that keep re-opening pop-ups on you, about as fast as you can close them?

BTW, if you go to look at drudgereport.com while at work or with the SO around, make durn sure you spell it right.  One mispelling in the url got me to a porn site that just wouldn't quit.  I had to power-off & suffer the scandisk or whatever it's called in NT.

[url]www.zonelabs.com[/url]

Download Ad-Aware from this link.

[url]www.lsfileserv.com/index.html[/url]

You can get it from c-net too. It uses something similar to virus scanner signature files and is kept up to date. It's pretty cool.

I downloaded Popup stopper and I am getting more ad now than ever!

HELP?!!?

Best thing to do is to only use sites that don't employ the friggin' popups.  I used to use ABCnews.com until they started, now I only use CNN.com for news.  Same with many other sites.  For doing internet searches, google.com is hard to beat, and no popups.  Forget altavista.

I use [url=http://www.mozilla.org]Mozilla[/url] for my browser.  It has all the privacy features you want included. If you set the preferences right, you can have it allow cookies from only certain domains that you want, and deny all others.   You can also turn off specific features of Javascript so that, for example, popup windows that you don't request won't appear.  Totally stable too.