I have been experiencing some strange IE8 behavior over the past one to two months:
I will get the standard "IE8 has been stopped. Would you like to report this to MS?" message. I realize the wording is totally wrong, but I don't have it memorized. It is the correct kind of message delivery, though.
The thing is: There is no shutdown of IE8 and no applications or web-pages are closed. Things continue as normal whether or not I click on the report to MS button.
Now, I know that IE8 is set to self-recover in a number of closed-window situations, so the behavior is credible, but unusual in the extreme.
The trigger is often -- but not always -- my closing a tab or closing IE8 completely. It is happening on two out of four computers. The two computers have two things in common: both are WinXP and both have NIS2011 on it. The other two are WinVista and Win7 and both have NSS on them.
There is no toxic behavior, no attempts to take over the desktop, no attempts to redirect, no perceivable inexplicable background behavior, no crashes, no slowdown, no hidden launches of email, no takeover of address books, ...nada! Full scans by Norton, Super Antivirus, and Malwarebytes come up clean.
The messages are annoying in their frequency, but have no other effect.