WTF?! When I start up a game and monitor its' activity, it accesses browser memory

[BelgianMadCow]

and chat program memory via a temporary program located in a temp folder.
Internet Explorer, for some unknown reason, puts the files you accessed on your own PC in the browser history.

I'm at the point of going offline with it - this totally creeps me out.

:shrug:

[LakeSamish706]

1. Switch Browsers to Firefox! n/t

[BelgianMadCow]

3. I have, but internet explorer still does the same thing.

As does the game.

[Akoto]

2. Internet Explorer is extremely intrusive, security holes aside.

It stores information about what you're doing everywhere. There are even index.dat files in multiple locations, difficult to find and equally difficult to clean. As someone above said, I strongly suggest Firefox. It offers much more privacy and better control over what is and is not saved on your computer.

As well, there are privacy programs out there which can help you clean up things like browsing history / cookies / temp files. These are good to use simply for cleaning up, not just for ensuring privacy.

[BelgianMadCow]

4. On edit : "rootkit-like behaviour"

Pay special attention to 'Device Driver Installation' and 'Physical Memory Access' alerts. Again, not many legitimate applications would cause such an alert and this is usually a good indicator of malware/rootkit like behavior. Unless you know for a fact that the application performing the activity is legitimate, then Comodo recommend blocking these requests.

From Comodo (firewall) help function.

[Speck Tater]

5. Many of the components of Internet Explorer...

are in dll files so they can be used by other applications. Programmers can call up various parts of IE to things like formatting HTML text and so on. I've discovered quite a few programs that require IE be installed in order to work because they use those portable components. It's not so much "sinister" as it is a convenience for programmers so they don't have to re-invent the wheel when they need some functionality already available as a library function in IE.

[BelgianMadCow]

6. Good info, thanks