Not to worry, and thanks to both of you. I didn't realize what Sync Settings did. I thought in terms of syncing devices like mobile to desktop etc, so that was a great find here.
The problem that drives this is rather small appearing, more like a nag. But it resists efforts in identifying and therefore, solution, other than a clean install.
It started out with generating a new tab in Firefox. Instead of opening a blank tab, the Address bar suddenly became populated with all the addresses of all the existing tabs in one long line! Of course, that didn't fly. So I decided to switch to IE and it did the same thing, but this time, merely opening IE caused the address bar to be populated with all the addresses of the FF tabs. WTF! This is true for versions newer than IE9, which behaves itself.
Multiple computer scans including scannow which did find problems and fixed them except for a couple which from the log, I saw they were IE problems. The rest, Malwarebytes, Security Essentials and an independent virus scan came up blank. At this point, I'm being advised to start over. I can live without any more tabs but I don't like it.
I also don't like simply redoing the OS and apps. If it happened once, it can happen again, unless I know why.
It's 1 AM so I'm done for now.