I've been trying to avoid IE forever, with Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, Firefox, and even Maxthon (Maxthon was/is a "development partner" of MS).
But you have to keep it around, because there are a few sites that demand it, and a few apps that use IE DLL's and rendering (the excellent SharpReader RSS reader). So you're stuck.
95 percent of all sites seem to do well with Firefox and Opera.
Well, looks like I'll have to find out how to have Firefox lie when a site demands IE. I know it can be done, I've just never worried about it until now.