For a very nice browser; I would reccomend trying out the Opera browser (version 9.26 atm).
In Vista 64bit, you have to allow windows to open the Opera browser every time, but it stays up so it doesnt bother me.
With Opera you can view email (also from a hotmail account), use IRC (firewalls may have to be set to allow IRC in order for this to work) and a simple bittorrent download window.
It also has widgets but I do not have the need to use them.
I suggest;
-Previewing and downloading a skin for the browser, that you like (easily managed).
-Remove any buttons you dont really need (rigth click and "remove from toolbar"), and rely on keyboard shortcuts instead (like Ctrl + left arrow to go back in page history, or F5 key to reload a page).
-Place bookmarks and folders (folders give fast access to more organized bookmarks) on the toolbar (called "personal bar").
-Bookmarks are shown with icon and text by default iirc, shorter Description text beside the favicon makes for more space for bookmarks on a row on the "personal bar".
-Customize the "personal bar" and place a "find in page" tool onto it, to easily find certain words in large documents on screen.
-Right click the "personal bar" and customize it to "wrap to multiple lines", that way you get 2-3 or more rows of handy bookmarks on top of the screen as you save them (you can drag the url field to the personal bar to save a bookmark there).
-Enable mouse gestures after a while and try it out. After a while you probably dont want any forms of navigation buttons on the browser window at all.
-One mouse gesture work like this; hold down RMB and then click LMB, the webpage will then "go back" to previosly loaded page in that tab.
-Another one; hold down RMB and move the mouse downwards and then to the left, to close a tab and switch focus to any other tab on the left side (one of my customized mouse gestures).
-Another one; Hold down RMB and move the mouse upwards, to stop a page from loading (customized mouse gesture)
-Click MMB on any tab containing a webpage to close it.
-Use Ctrl + MMB to open any link in a new tab, but keeping the new tab with the new webpage in the background.
-To flip/scoll through the multiple tabs showing webpages, hold down RMB and turn the mouse wheel (wheel set as MMB on my computer).
-To sort bookmarks in your own order, you have to choose "sort by my order" from the "View" rolldown in the bookmark menu.
-Writing "g windows" in the url field, takes you to the google search engine where it searches for the word "windows"
-Other search engines can easily be included, so you could type say "im cars" to find info on the movie Cars on the InternetMovieDataBase website. It can be customized by simply right clicking a search field anywhere and select "create search".
Customization of say mousegesture, using other combinations that are already provided, may take some studying to learn to set it up.
Using the " | " key between two commands, tells opera to toggle between the two commands when the mouse gesture is performed.
Using the " & " key between two commands, tells opera to do "this" and then "that" in order to perform two operations in one go.
If having problem with the media player plug-in, please see this thread to update the WMP11 plug-in:
http://www.vistax64.com/software/137437-opera-browser-media-player-11-solution-issue-solved.html
Sorry 'bout that...
I would rather use Comodo antivirus but they have not put a 64bit release yet. Anyhow I tried kaspersky but it really caused problems with me and my machine, so I stick with avast. 
I also bought a perfectdisk 8 and never had any problems with that on my machine. I am a big fan of using lavasoft ad-aware, unfortunately they do not have support for vista 64bit yet. I use windows internet explorer as it is already there for me to use 