Glen:
faster than Mozilla - is there a suite of 'lighter' programs that I should choose? Any recommendations?
There are two things I feel happy with recommending at the moment:
http://www.icewm.org/ or http://www.xfce.org/
Which you'll get on with better depends on your personal taste and whether you mind having to put it together yourself. XFCE has a website being put together for it called "XFCE IP" or something similar which will list applications that work well with it.