IE is so much a part of the operating system that "disabling" it would cause functions in the rest of the OS to become unstable. You can move the icon or disguise it, but you really can't "disable" it. You could tell the computer you are on a "Lan" connection, thus, you could right click on the IE icon choose the Connection tab and input a false proxy setting and tell it to never dial up another connection. This will give you the ubiquitous "Server cannot be found" message whenever IE's icon is clicked. (You will have to undo all of this to make Windows Update work, and you will have to use Firefox, Mozilla or Netscape and configure their connection to get out onto the net correctly).