1. Port Scanners? I'm not 100% sure what their all about. I've been reading some stuff on download.com about 'em and I can't quite figure what their use is? I've seen one or two that scans a network for open ports and gives you the computers workgruop name etc. In't that illigal?
A port scanner is essentially a program that probes a number of TCP/UDP ports on a machine to see if it's possible to connect. A connection idicates a service/deamon is running on that port.

2. I've got an app called Commview which is a packet sniffer. And I wanna know how to decode the packets? Sent from my PC out over the network just see what sort of information I'm giving out.
Get Ethereal. It's works for Windows/*nix, has a nice GUI and does all the decoding for you. It has neat features that make it easy to trace different "conversations" between different protocols. Ethereal use winpcap which is based on the *nix tcpdump and it supports just about every protocol you could want to sniff. Really useful for debug network problems. And it's Open Source.

3. You know the quick launch pannel next to the start menu? Well, I tryed to get rid of I.E 6 a few weeks ago and I trashed some files and so I rebooted my computer, then when WIN started back up I lost all my short cuts from the quick launch bar and I can't put anthing back there coz it won't let me. I've copyed a few files from my WIN 98 CD across to my system but still no joy. Any suggestion?
http://www.litepc.com/. It lets you remove IE and it's free.