The second time only IE was open, 3 instances - 1 window for a gmail account and 2 windows with pages from a financial news site. These 3 pages plus another couple from the same financial news site and a couple of MS pages would have been the instances of IE open on the first occasion.
I never use IE for general browsing - always use Firefox - and cannot remember when I last had anything, other than the pages mentioned above, opened in IE.