Reinstalling Windows 7 home premium 32-bit & IE9 beta?

[natsumerio]

I have Windows 7 home premium 32-bit (American english language version), & I think that I need to reinstall it (preferably asap), but I have some questions before I do so.

Why I think that I need to do this is because after I downloaded Fire-fox, I removed as much of IE as I could. I searched through the hard-drive for it & used unlocker to remove whatever I found. Then I found that I needed a non-Fire-fox browser because Fire-fox most online images are jpegs, & I prefer to save jpegs as bitmaps (which Fire-fox won't do) & then convert them to pngs later. At first I tried Avant (which opens links in new tabs as BLANKS) & then Maxthon (which can't render/open 99% of the sites that I go to), got sick of their short-comings, & uninstalled them. Finally, I downloaded & tried installing IE9-beta, but it fails to finish installing because Windows 7 says that I have a newer version of IE already installed.

I have all of my images & text files backed up at http://www.4shared.com/ & on cd-roms & all of my programs are free stuff that I can re-download in I do need to reinstall Windows 7.

& now, my questions.

1) Given my situation, is there something that I should try to get IE9-beta installed before giving up & just reinstalling Windows 7?

2) The reinstall will be to the same computer that it's already on, so can I use the same activation number as before? If not, what is microsoft's phone number so that I can get a new activation number, if possible?

3) Is there a way to reinstall Windows 7 & IE9-beta instead of IE8, because I would prefer to use it instead?

4) Is there any way to trim the fat from Windows 7 DURING the reinstall?

Edited October 10, 2010 by natsumerio