"as for IE, it seems to be sensitive and I often hear complaints about it being broken in some way or another."...I am not surprised since this is a Microsoft application.
I usually use Firefox 13.0.1. I find that IE and sometimes Firefox act up especially when there are a lot of TCP Delays caused by 'traffic shaping'. The 600mS+ latency of satellite might also be a factor for me.
When I get the time I will be moving to a Linux setup for monitoring. My hope is that sometime in the deep future rural high speed access reliability will be prdictable like picking up the phone or accessing my satelite TV programming.
"I have just been curious not critical since I first started using TestMy, as to why IE8 is showing me speed results that are unusually higher than I have ever seen in 8 years,"
Possibly 'traffic shaping". I find that the ISP is able to adjust speeds dependent on the application. Typically time-dependent apps like VoIP are less affected than file transfer aps like FTP and BitTorrent. This is why I use these speed tests as tools to look at connection speeds when I experience sluggish performance. Sometimes there is a lot of disk access going on slowing my notebook unrelated to my broadband connection.