Occasionally my laptop starts typing in French, but there's this little keyboard symbol beside the bar in the lower right corner which lets me switch it back to "US" typing, instead of "Canadian Multilingual Standard" or "Canadian French", whichever one it happened to switch to at the time. If you don't have one of those you might be able to find something under Keyboard in the Control Panel, or Google might tell you how to solve the problem.

As for wireless, I know with my laptop I have this little switch on the front that I can flick to tell it not to connect to wireless, but I know that there's an option in the wireless settings to stop it from connecting too. But as tli said, it is pretty much an automatic thing, though if you haven't actually got a router, it shouldn't be able to connect at all.

Pre-installed programs can be annoying, but you can uninstall them if it's something you're absolutely sure you won't need. But if you can't be sure, just leave them. Although, if it means you end up having multiple virus programs or something lie that, it can be a problem because each program can interfere with the others, so that's something you'll want to only have one of. If a few came with the computer, just try each of them and then pick the one you like, and uninstall the others.

Good luck with Sally! :D