I'm a novice when it comes to computers. This is my first Mac, a Macbook with 2.2GHz Intel, 2G RAM and 250GB HDD. OS X 10.5.2. In my work I needed to use outlook web access in an Internet Explorer type interface and I need to use descent image editing software. 

For OWA, I downloaded ies4osx (I had to download something called Darwine first) and chose Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 to install (www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/) and initially this worked fine. I noticed that every time I started IE, another program called x11 started up, I assumed this was part of the deal when using IE, so let it run. 

I then needed to edit images, and was too tight-fisted to buy photoshop for Mac. So I found GIMP, went to the site, where I followed to the word, the instructions. First, I inserted my OSX disc, went to optional installs, ticked the x11 box and clicked the "upgrade" button. Once this operation was completed, I then read the bit that said if this was the first time I was installing x11 from the OSX disc, I had to reinstall the 10.5.2 combo update, otherwise GIMP will crash. So I downloaded the update and tried to install it, only to be told by my computer that I wasn't allowed to do this. When I tried running GIMP, it wouldn't start. So I went back to the website, which told me that if I was having trouble with this, I could use the older Tiger version, which should work anyway. So I downloaded the Tiger version, and installed it. This will not launch either. And no x11 application, this will not start. 

 What is worse, IE wont work. So I tried everything, eventually removing IE, Darwine, and x11 (x11 from OSX disc)  and reinstalling them. x11.app appears in the utilities folder, but doesn't seem to run. When trying to reinstall IE 6.0, the installer gets stuck at "creating winprefix".

 Eventually I bought codeweavers which lets me run an old version of Photoshop, but this is very slow. Tried to get help from Apple, but they were very, very unhelpful, basically telling me to reinstall x11 (which I already did) and that they cant help with 3rd party software. 

 Can anyone help me and save me from having to install Windows on my Mac, which I really, really dont want to do.