O.K. I'm actually ready to jettison IE (running on XP Home) and my choices for a new e-mail client/browser are 1)Netscape 7.2 (custom install to avoid bloatware I don't use), 2) Latest non-beta version of Mozilla (is it 1.7??), or Firefox browser with ??? e-mail client.
Suggestions, please.
Mozilla is up to 1.7.3, IIRC. Very solid browser suite, and if you want an all-in-one program (web browser + email + web coding + others), it's great. Opera 7.54 does many of the same features, and a few people report that it's even faster than Firefox, but it comes at the cost of rendering pages accurately. On some of the more complex pages, it chokes badly.
Firefox is great if you just want a lightweight browser: you can customize whichever frills you want by installing the appropriate extension. Version 1.0 is set to be released in 5 days, an upgrade from the current 1.0 preview release version. Not all extensions are going to work immediately upon 1.0's release, but give it a couple of days and you shouldn't have any problems. FF also has theme support, so you can customize its look.
If you get Firefox, you could get either Mozilla Thunderbird or Eudora for email. Eudora is a great one, but Thunderbird is pretty fully-featured itself. Try them both out--you win either way.