[stomachmonkey]

OK, Set him up with one of the webbased email soultions, gmail, yahoo, whatever you are most familiar with. Set that to his home page in the browser.

Upper left corner under the Apple go to System Preferences.

Choose the Accounts pane and then Login Items. Click the + sign to add the browser as a Start Up application so if he reboots it comes right back for him.

Downloads usually default to the Desktop. To keep things clean I'd make a Downloads folder on the Desktop and tell the broweser to dump stuff in there. To many Icons on the Desktop will give a performance hit.