Go into your User folder (your home holder), and open Library, then Preferences. Find the Explorer folder, and put that folder in the trash. That might allow IE to open OK.
If not, you just are not using a very stable version of OS X. Version 10.1 is considered to be the first usable, stable version of OS X, with each major version since then improving on that. Some might argue about OS X 10.4 being more stable, but certainly much better than 10.0 (or 10.1, or 10.2, or...), in addition to being much more speedy/smooth.
Stability goes a long way to helping more apps work reliably....