Yea, IE has just gottne too unsafe to use anymore. I gave up on IE and windows about 5 yeras ago after I got hit twice with some crap I had to reinstall to remove. I had my system locked down really secure, running as a non admin user, etc.
No software is perfect and no software is completely safe, but to have the browser integrated into the os allows a browser hole to become an OS hole, the worst thing Microsoft ever did was that integration.