See if this helps with the extra apps opening:
I was able to fix the problem myself yesterday. I went to the mapped objects section, I expanded the sys object to show the browser object. Then I right clicked on the browser object and selected "Show in object browser". After doing this several times, it seemed to "wakeup" the object browser and it started working and has been working ever since. There is an odd side affect to this, everytime I open testcomplete and use source control to connect to the TFS server, the windows calculator app and my chrome browser both open. This did not happen when the object browser wasn't working, so somehow its triggering those two applications to open. I have contacted support.
See if this helps with the extra apps opening:
Thank you for the link. I tried it out and now unwanted programs are no longer starting up.
