That spinning globe was a single registry entry. Nothing harmful. FYI, IE 6.0 deletes it.
Well, it was there in win95, there when I upgraded to winME, there when I did my dangedest to reinstall IE several times and changed versions, there when I reinstalled winME a few times. All that long after I uninstalled Earthlink.
It only went away when I reformatted my drive. If I had known about the registry entry, I would have looked for it and deleted it. I did a registry search for the string " -- provided by earthlink" which was also stuck on my browser, and found a couple entries(as I recall), but deleting them didn't make the string go away.
It's probably just one of those little things that was tangled up in the un-uninstallable portions of that version of MSIE, some tidbit of data serialized by an obscure COM object. But there was also the sporadic network activity that showed up on the netmon but not in the firewall. It made me paranoid.
Incidentally, I just downloaded and ran the SpyBot program. It found the remnants of some spyware that I had already disabled(Gator) and several tracking cookies. No keystroke monitors or any active spyware. So I guess I am safe *for now*.