Well, you could just use Skype for it's original purpose and do voice im's..
One product that I used to use was
http://www.freeworlddialup.com/, which allowed you to make
free phone calls to any land line worldwide, yet I do not know if the program still works anymore, ever since they started to use Pulver Communicator as their medium of choice.
Firefox is also this neat little web browser that is near impossible to hijack and it doesn't accept spyware as easily as Internet Explorer... I think some people may have heard of it here as well
