OK, figured I would take another stab at this. It is one of those things that just bugs me.
Train, I tried going through the process again to establish Google as my default search engine. Searches entered in the IE7 search bar do go through Google. Searches enterred in the address bar get redirected through Ask.com.
Broni, as mentioned in my original post, I looked in Add/remove. There doesnt seem to be anything there that relates to ask.com.