To address another of Michelle's questions:
Didn't Achashverosh tell Esther, right before her request to hang Haman's sons, that Haman's sons were hung?
This question once bothered me also, and as a budding Tanakh teacher who didn't have a blog to write to, I thought of the following. (The mefarshim on the megillah that I saw don't really address it explicitly.) If you read the peshat carefully, though, you see that at the beginning of perek 9 it says that the 10 sons of Haman were killed in the battle in Shushan, and then Esther asked that they be hanged. The hanging was not a means of killing them, since they were already dead. Rather, this display was probably meant to instill fear in any potential enemies of the Jews. See Devarim 21:22-23 and the mefarshim there for a mention of the practice of hanging a dead body and the limits thereof.
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