Long story short, this is the sequence of events:
I had a lot of tabs open, and when I closed everything for the night (I was sleepy) I realized that there was a popup window that I hadn't noticed. After that, trying to restore my last session resulted in the re-opening of that popup window- and ONLY that popup window.
However, I know that my old session is still saved- most likely somewhere in
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Recovery
- in fact, after I had given up on it and assumed it was just lost, at one point when I started up IE, I got the old message at the bottom of the screen saying that IE closed unexpectedly (it hadn't) and it asked if I wanted to restore the last session. I did, and the old session was resorted, and I figured everything was fine.
But now all those tabs are gone again... how do I get them back?
I've learned my lesson- I'll switch to another browser after this, most likely... but seriously, what the heck?
Is there some way to just open the files directly and copy the urls? They show up as gibberish in a txt editor...