Have you checked for anything "sinister"? I mean, using Internet Explorer is like walking around in a pitch black room full of trigger happy gun nuts wearing a glowing neon bulls eye target on your chest and back.
Just like you'd expect to be shot multiple times in the above example, you should be expecting something "sinister" to happen to your system when using Internet Explorer. Why people continue to use IE is beyond me. Forget all the usual arguments, IE is the ONLY browser with a malware problem. That alone seems like a compelling enough reason to find something (anything) else.
But until you've actively checked for some kind of "sinister" activity on your system, I'd assume that Internet Explorer has been compromised. Actually that's how you should be treating it all the time, but especially when something odd has happened seemingly out of nowhere.
The IE icon on my desktop (Sony Vaio, Vista 32-bit Home Premium) has renamed itsef as 'hh', i.e. this is the subtext that now appears under the icon. The link still works perfecly normally and opens IE at my Google homepage. In my 'Start' menu the name still appears as 'Internet Explore'. Everything seems ok, I don't see anything that looks sinister. (I was renaming some photos yesterday, but did not use hh as a file name).
Should I just rename the icon? Thanks.

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