How to get rid of iexplore.exe? Help

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I assume their is no social engineering.

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?????
Don't know why you would ask this in this scenario, but no ( geeeeesh, ... you must be as paranoid as me! ) Don't you know I am one of the most trust-worthy persons on AO????
( Even though it's true, if you believe it I have a bridge to sell you. )

Again, I stand by my first post. But I would also consider Timmy77 's and nihil 's request to know if there could be spyware, etc. Although I have not used Opera in quite a while, I believe IE should not be running, even though in the background, unless as nihil said you have auto-updates enabled which I do not.. ( it doesn't here, XPsp2 and Mozilla product, ... oh, wait a minute, My wife woke up and kicked me off that machine ... but it still was true )

You should try to download process explorer from http://www.sysinternals.com/ and run that, the site also has several other applications for windows included in the ps-tools stuff. These applications will show you what is running at the time it is running, what is really running mind you, and it also shows you the actual tree of execution. This will show you where that iexplore.exe is coming from. Using this you can see whether or not it is the real IE. If it isn't (IE shouldn't load on startup, or unless you specifically tell it to) it will tell you where it is, delete(stop it from execution first) that one. If it comes back you have a virus, otherwise if it is the real IE, something got a little screwy in your registry.