Unfortunately, QuerySEQ's post is, in all likelyhood, wrong.

1) The reason the application footprint got smaller is that they were able to remove all of the the old UI code and resources from the application. Instead of having code and resources for 2 UIs, they only had one.

2) EQ itself probably does not use IE to do its XML work. Why? because that would require a large amount of code in memory, that EQ doesnt need. More than likely, they picked up one of the many extremely inexpensive (or even free), and light weight XML parsing libraries, and use it to parse the UI xml. It is even quite possible that they wrote their own, since it is a relatively trivial task.

3) EQ has always hit the temporary internet files, since LONG before the new UI was introduced (just searching on this forum will show that to be true). EQ loads the IE libraries (which, in turn look through temporary internet files) in order to do the patching, which uses standard HTTP as its transport.

As for wether or not they can look at what pages you are going through: Any application on your system could do that. For that matter, its pretty trivial to write some javascript on a web page that does the same thing. Are they doing it and sending back information? No.

Again, ALL of this information has been stated before, by many people here, myself included...

--Jeeves