Internet Explorer needs to close before opening Earthlink Total Access

I've had Earthlink for years, and I've been using Firefox for a couple of them.
But after my last reformat/reinstallation, I get an error message almost everytime I open up Total Access. It hangs for twenty seconds, before it opens a dialogue box stating what i wrote in the title of this post.
Iexplore is running in taskmanager; I dont use it, though, and have it "uninstalled" as far as add/remove programs says it is...
Basically, I have never had this problem. Of course if I end the iexplore process before I do anything, I do not have this problem. How can I permanently kill this process? A batch file maybe?
Its an annoyance at most, but if youve got info on what I might do to solve this, that would be great.