Is it worth dropping the support for old Internet Explorer, I don't really know. What I know is, making sites for just Gecko (Firefox), Presto (Opera) and Webkit (Chrome, Safari) is easier.
Last week I had to recreate a development environment for a EPiCMS 5 SP1 R2 (a mouth full), the problem was all I had to go from was the production environment.
I have used BBClone Web Counter for over 5 years, and sop far i haven’t found any replacement for it. As for now I am using CMSimple i decided to use bbclone again. I found out it would take some time to get bbclone streamlined CMSimple.
Sometimes you need a quick and dirty PHP development environment. For that i usually use Abyss Web Server with PHP in CGI mode. Once I decided to make custom error and directory listing pages.