My brand-new Acer Aspire M5100 pc, 2 gig RAM, pre-installed Vista Home
Premium had a fatal crash, so a complete disk format/reinstall from the
hidden disk partition via Acer's "Empowering Technology" was done. I have no
OS disk.

Then, I uninstalled the bundled demo progs (Office 2007, Norton, etc) and
did full updates.  My AV is AVG 7.5 (not 8, which is documented as giving
problems).

Despite all this, IE7 continues to be "flaky", has never run correctly.
(before and after SP1).

I have 2 meg rated cable, yet downloads (from any source, incl MS) are
continually hanging, to the point where memories of dial-up come to haunt
me.  Tests on PCPitstop report download/upload within a few % of ISP's
claims (1.83mb down, 186 kb up being the norm).  A "definitions" download of
1.2mb took nearly 4 minutes, and the 66mb Vista SP1 took half an hour.

Further - IE7 totally crashes when trying to print a web page.  Fault report
says it's with mshtml.dll, but the only MSN site report I found on this is
one I read for 10 minutes before realising it was for XP and earlier, not
Vista.  IE7's "online search for solution" does nothing except delay the
restart of itself.

I'm not a novice - my "old" pc is still running the original installation of
XP with few problems and no crashes (and I date back to the dark ages of
Win3.1 in maintaining home pc's for the family).

Rather than waste a further 3 days on another new installation, updates,
drivers etc ... can I just install IE7 as a "clean" install.  Is this
possible? if so, where is the source file?

If not, will Vista allow a non-MS browser to replace it, without creating
yet more problems?