this was right for Windows XP and IE. Because you are running an account with admin rights. That's why I moved in 2003/4 to FireFox (Phoenix as it was called at this days). With Vista, the IE runs in a sandbox with LowRights (protected mode) and so you can only write to special Registry folders and file locations (LocalLow). And with IE8 all tabs are isolated in a new process. With FF I often have the issue, that one tab can cause the whole FF to crash And the FF has lots of memory leaks. If Ms would integrate a cool and easy theme and extension platform I would switch back to IE, so I have to stay with FF because of some of some important extensions I use (AdblockPLus, NoScript, GreaseMonkey, AutoCopy, BBCode and some more).