How to remove a botched IE8 installation

During an automatic update, IE8 was tried to be installed in a computer here. For some reason the installation didn’t finished successfully and now, no matter that the Internet Explorer version still reports as IE7, the computer is acting up every time time that IE is used.
I think that the reason is that botched IE8 installation. Is there any way to get rid of any traces of the IE8 botched installation ??. Any help will be appreciated.
Operating system : XP Pro Service Pack 3. Scanned for viruses/malware and doesn’t report anything.
Thank you !
cce52