Does Google Chrome screw up other Browsers?

One of the jobs I used to do, but I spend my life trying to escape from is IT support. Occasionally I get asked by a friend to help sort out their computer. Recently a friend was having all manner of problems with his Internet Explorer browser. This was reported to me as "I can't get on to the Internet". I went round, performed a couple of checks and found the Internet was fine. I then tried to run Explorer. It ran like a dog. I had a quick look to see if he had any other browsers installed. Sure enough, there was Google Chrome. So I quickly tried that and hey presto - S**t off a shovel speed response. I showed this to him and said "try using Chrome for a while and see if that is better". To be honest, I'm not a fan of Internet Explorer at the best of times. I put it down to an old version of this. I thought no more about it until this weekend. As I said, I've never been a fan of explorer, so I use Firefox at home. This has been trouble free. However over the last two weeks, it has been running like a dog. I had given my laptop to a friend to fix a hardware issue and since it came back, it hasn't been right. Yesterday I spent the day going through all of the normal steps to sort it out. This didn't work. That is why yesterday is the first day for months with no blog !

Anyway, in desperation, I decided to uninstall a stack of old crap that the kids had installed - old games etc. I then defragged the disc and rebooted. Still no luck. Then I happened to notice Google Chrome was installed. Out of curiousity I ran it. The response was awesome. I thought "Oh, I must have cured the problem", so I shut Chrome and ran Firefox - again response like a dog. Back to Chrome - superb. Anyway, I still didn't put two and two together. This morning, I had a meeting at the studios with a friend who is a graphic designer. He is doing some work for me. He mentioned that he has a Mac and normally uses Safari, but this has been "playing up" recently. He said he found that Chrome was more reliable recently.

So the question is "Does Google Chrome screw up other Browsers". Maybe it is just faster and better, but this doesn't really explain why other browsers suddenly seem to go wrong once Chrome is introduced to the system. I did. Now whilst Chrome seems to work fine (this blog is written via the Chrome Browser) it is always a pain migrating between browsers. Life for me is too short to spend swatting up on browser optimisation.

I did a quick search (using BING.COM) out of paranoia that google may nobble such a search and see no evidence of anyone else having such problems? Am I really alone in finding this problem?