Ugh, XP takes up so much diskspace it makes me sick. My RedHat8.0 install took up 2 gigs, which included all the graphical environments I could find, and about eight million programs, including five web browsers, a complete office suite (openoffice), three email programs and three media players. Oh yeah, and DVD's and DivX work just great now
Just try and remove any apps (MSN messenger for one; use Trillian or Jabber instead!). Kill system restore; it keeps gobs of discspace. My recycle bin I never use... I get PGP to wipe all the files I want to delete.
You can't remove IE. It's the same as Explorer, which is the core of Windows NT now. You could remove explorer properly in 98, but not any more. Ah, isn't product integration a great thing? I've just configured IE and Windows Media Player so that they can't access the internet anyway.
IE cache? Heh. My Opera and Mozilla caches are set at 2 GB each, and I never flush them out. I like being able to cache lots of stuff.
And if you're going to kill annoying startup programs (that is, if you were daft enough to install them in the first place), you're better off editing the registry and killing all the dll's, so that none of those load either. There's plenty of startup programs that don't show themselves in the startup folder anyway (like the bits of Creative and RealPlayer designed to spy on you) which you'll only ever see by being thorough with your task manager and vigilant with the registry.