How do I uninstall Internet Explorer from windows?

On add/remove programs window, select the 3rd option on the left tab, it should say something like "add or remove windows components".

From there, you should find an "internet explorer" checkbox. unchecking it removes internet explorer.

edit

since you seem to have a permission issue, i will explain how to solve it:

takeown /f <directory name> /r /d y

icacls <directory name> /grant administrators:F /t

the following commands grant you ownership and full rights to a given directory.

(assuming you are on administrators group)

This will not really uninstall IE per se, but I reckon it should serve your purposes:

• Open the start menu and type in Turn Windows features on or off.
• Select it; once the list of features gets populated, you simply need to un-check the option for IE.

This method is clean and won't raise any issues. On a side note, this is how you "install/uninstall" the default games, media features and the like as well.

P.S. There is no clean way to actually remove IE from your Win7 OS. As the Wikipedia article on the Removal of IE (yes, there is actually one, believe it or not),

Microsoft has held that this is not meaningful; that in Windows 98 and newer versions, "Internet Explorer" is not a separate piece of software but simply a brand name for the Web-browsing and HTML-displaying capacities of the Windows operating system. In this view, the result of removing IE is simply a damaged Windows system; to have a working system without IE one must replace Windows entirely.