We introduce in this paper the concepts of rings characterized by minimal one-sided ideals and concern ourselves with rings containing an injective maximal left ideal. Some known results for idempotent reflexive rings and left HI rings can be extended to left MC2 rings. As applications, we are able to give some new characterizations of regular left self-injective rings with non-zero socle and extend some known results for strongly regular rings.

Nicholson and Watters have recently investigated rings with projective socles and they have shown, among other things, that a ring R has a projective socle if and only if each matrix ring Mn(R), n > 1, has a projective socle. We generalize this result by showing that if S is an excellent extension of R, then the socle of R is projective if and only if the socle of S is projective. Examples of excellent extensions include, as well as matrix rings Mn(R), skew group rings R * G where G is a finite group and the order of G is invertible in R.

If P is an indecomposable projective R-module generated by a countable set X, then, for some countable subring S of R, P contains an indecomposable projective S-module generated by X. The subring S may be chosen to inherit many standard ring-theoretic properties from R.