1
Enter your boot.ini and remove the entry you do not want.
2.
The fix to your problems is to keep using firefox

. When IE7 comes out then you can safely update and have the problem resolved.
3.
Dail up rarely reaches the advertised 56k mark because of "dirty lines" this can be lines hitting eachother in the wind and a variety of other causes it's more common to see 34k speeds on dial up so I would not be overly concerned.