I would encourage you to upgrade from 10 to 11. IE 11 has a number of useful improvements over earlier versions.
One in particular is that 11 deprecates the old RC4 cipher suite for encryption. This is a critical security plus.
11 is said to perform faster than 10, even faster in some instances than Firefox or Chrome. I can't personally vouch for that, but only because I don't use IE enough to give a fair speed rating to it. It's also alleged to have a smaller memory footprint which is handy in a system with only a few GB of RAM.
I can't advise about the tools, since I don't use them. But if you would use them, I'd say it's worth a try at least.
Sorry I can't be more strongly pro/con but I want to be fair and my own experience with IE is only a tiny sample.
I use it quite a lot on a half a dozen different configurations of Windows 7 and W8. I think it is faster than Chrome about 1/2 the time, the other half it’s close. I don’t endorse any browser config because I have learned over the years that they all seam to perform very differently for people based on their configurations. I think most performance issues may be caused by toolbars, plugins, and weird AV combinations. I personally run one firewall and one AV only. Whenever I run into a system with more running, it always is f’ed up imho.