Seems pretty cut and dry to me. According to Geek News Central, IE is considered by some to be unsafe most of the time. The big problem is that a fully patched IE is still quite vulnerable to most malware in the wilds of the Internet.

ScanIT, an Internet security consultancy, reports Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was unsafe 98 percent of the time, during 2004. The data were collected from 195,000 internet users who used ScanIT’s online security checker. The reported 98 percent unsafe rating is based on security holes being found in fully-patched installations of Internet Explorer on every day of the year 2004, except the week between October 12 and 19.

A fully-patched installation of Internet Explorer doesn’t mean that the user is safe from malware. For over half of 2004, 54 percent of the time (200 days), a worm or virus was in the wild that could take advantage of additional vulnerabilities for which a patch was not available from Microsoft.