IE 9 constantly crashing on startup and/or when opening new pages or tabs

I recently allowed MS to upgrade my computer from IE 8, which worked without issue, to IE 9 which is a crash happy nightmare. IE 8 worked fine, Google Chrome works fine, and Firefox works fine so IE 9 is definitely the problem. The only reason I care about IE at all and am not only using the superior Chrome / Firefox browsers exclusively is that I have some applications and tools that require IE, so unfortunately I have to keep using it for some things.

The error I constantly get is that DEP had to shutdown IE because and add in was trying to use system memory incorrectly (of course you would think that disabling all add ons or starting in no add on mode or doing a reset would fix this - but you'd be wrong!!!). If there's a way to fix IE9 that doesn't require me re-installing Windows and hours of fiddling, then I'd appreciate your feedback on same. If not, then I'll probably just nuke IE 9 and go back to IE 8 and tell Windows Update to ignore IE9 moving forward. That seems like an unfortunate solution, but IE 9 seems to be very finicky as I see lots of crash topics here and if you search the internet you find lots of IE 9 and Windows 7 crash topics and few if any on IE 8 or Windows versions prior to 7. So Windows 7 and IE 9 seem to be the problem combination. Most of the issues seem to be with MS's poorly implemented DEP which is not very tunable and seems to interfere with IE 9 a lot more often than is necessary, whereas it leaves IE 8, Chrome, and Firefox alone.

Steps I have take so far... Disabled all add-ons. Started IE in safe or no-add-on mode. Reset IE. The end result of all of those efforts was - no change. I still got the same crashes with no add ons, in safe mode, and after a reset. Thanks in advance for any assistance or advice you can offer.

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