Thanks for the suggestions.
None of them worked though.
I did a clean install (formatted the drive first).
It's really annoying me. When the OS was done installing, there were 3 icons on the taskbar: IE, libraries and WMP.
I unpinned IE by accident (was messing with stuff) and now i can't get it to re-appear on there.
I tried going to the Internet Explorer folder in Program Files and directly right-click on Internet Eplorer.exe which gives me the option to pin it to the taskbar, but when i click it, nothing happens. Right-clicking on Internet Eplorer.exe reveals that i can now 'unpin' it from the taskbar... so it changed, but the taskbar didn't do anything... it's frickin annoying.
Also dragging Internet Eplorer.exe directly to the taskbar shows a message to pin it, but once i release it, it disappears.
Guess we can classify this as a bug don't you think?