Internet Explorer is a normal Windows application, at least mostly. It has access to a couple of entitlements that normal applications don't get, since it needs to do things like access MSN Passport and launch ActiveX components, but it's possible to have the app itself crash without hosing the entire OS. The problems we're seeing here, however, are issues where Internet Explorer's (buggy) frameworks are being loaded into the Explorer.exe process (which is essentially the UI shell for Windows) and this is what is crashing, causing the computer to be unusable.

2002 called.