Unless there is something defective about IE8 for
you, and you really want to use an older version
of Internet Explorer, there is really no reason
to remove it.
In Control Panels : Add/Remove Programs, you will
find Add/Remove Windows Components. Internet Explorer
is an item in there. If you "untick" the box, the OS
will "hide" the iexplore.exe executable, so it cannot
be run.
If instead, you use Add/Remove Programs to remove IE8,
all it does is revert to the previous version of
IE, complete with armed and running iexplore.exe.
Note that certain sites *require* IE. For example,
at the current time, the catalog server at Microsoft,
the one that provides various updates, it uses
ActiveX, and Chrome won't work for that.
(Example of searching for KB3146449 as a download...)
http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/Search.aspx?q=3146449
*******
Now we come to the second bit of "bad news". Chrome is
no longer supported for WinXP. Yes, you can probably
dig up a crusty version from somewhere and install it,
but it won't be getting any security updates. And Chrome
needs all the help it can get (such as the PPAPI version
of Adobe Flash, otherwise known as PepperFlash). If there
is an exploit in Adobe Flash, then the user is well advised
to receive the corresponding PepperFlash update. Since
Google no longer supports Chrome, they won't be
shipping that to a WinXP user. They will be shipping
it to a Win7 user of Chrome.
So what's a person to do ?
Rethink your browser strategy ?
Look for (yet another) browser ?
We live in a great new world, where sticking
a fork in stuff is all-in-fashion. Hello
to No-Chrome-For-You, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Windows_XP_and_Vista
"Windows XP and Vista
Support for Google Chrome on Windows XP and Windows Vista
has ended as of April 2016."
The open-source version is Chromium, but I don't know
how updates work on it. Whether the updater is disabled,
and the user is expected to be a rocket-scientist. No idea.
I had it installed here once, and the hardest part was
even finding the damn download. The reason for installing
it, was to learn how to uninstall it for someone :-)
*******
Whether you have Chrome or Chromium, first look
for these files sitting in a folder.
chrome.7z ~150MB
setup.exe ~ 1MB
Now, in a command prompt window, cd to the path
where those files are located. Say
for example, you have C:\path\to\these\files\chrome.7z
Then, in Command Prompt, you would...
cd /d C:\path\to\these\files
If you now do the "dir" command, the two files should be listed.
chrome.7z
setup.exe
Then, if you want to uninstall the Chrome/Chromium package...
if a chromium installation:
setup.exe --uninstall
if a chrome installation:
setup.exe --uninstall --multi-install --chrome --system-level
Anyway, that's why I installed Chromium, so I could
verify the setup was the same (same two files). Someone
managed to get Chromium on their machine, and I haven't
a clue how they did it, because if Google slips in
an installer on you, it installs Chrome, not Chromium.
To install Chromium, is "hard" in terms of availability
and figuring out the URL of the download page.
You can start "burrowing" for Chromium, here. The Win page
has *thousands* of versions, so don't "burrow" for the
download over dialup. It'll take all night to get the
Win page to fully render.
https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/index.html
And this would be today's version. This'll save you
a few seconds.
https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/index.html?prefix=Win/390528/
And no, I don't know what you do next. I don't know whether
that's an actual 32 bit version for WinXP or not.
And you don't need to remove IE8 to test it. I keep IE
on this machine, and just... never use it. No problemo.
Good luck :-)
Paul