Win2000 Desktop Icons
 

On my desktop machine at home I have the IE icon/shortcut on my desktop. This machne is running Windows 2000. Now if I right-click that shortcut, I get sent to Internet Options instead of the shortcut options context menu.
How can I get rid of the IE desktop icon in Windows 2000 safely? Can I just drag it to the trash, or is there a more complex way I have to go about it not to damage IE?

First, why are you doing this anyway? I'm not clear as to why you'd want to do this in the first place.

Anyway, here's how you do it -- right click the desktop and go to properties. Check around the tabs, and in one of them (labeled desktop or effects perhaps), at the top will be a thing where you can check off which icons you want or don't want on the desktop. Uncheck IE, and apply/ok your way out.

I believe that you can just delete the shortcut. it's just some sort of "special" windows shortcut that gives a different option.
Sort of like having the my computer icon on the desktop.

I just tried dragging the icon to my trash and it asked me if I wanted to delete it from my desktop. I'm sure that you should still be able to just run it from another icon or something.

I just tried it and deleting the icon from the desktop didn't do anything special. I was able to create a new IE shorcut/use another IE shorcut to run IE.
Note: when I replaced the shorcut, it replaced it as a regular shorcut not that weird one that does the internet options thing.

Shortcuts are just that, shortcuts.

They pretty much can be deleted and re-created at will.

Now the executables themselves, you can't delete them with somekind of trouble.

For Windows 2000:

Open Internet Explorer
Go to Tools, Internet Options
Select the Advanced tab
Under the Browsing section, uncheck the last option Show Internet Explorer on the Desktop
Click Apply

It's impossible to delete explorer from windows accidentally.

Hell I've tried to do it on purpose and I had limited success.