Dan,
I never use IE so I have no idea about IE.
I use Chrome frequently so I have some idea about it. I guess you possibly have 2 Chrome browser binaries installed in your machine and they are different version. Recorder and Object Spy invoke a Chrome binary (chrome.exe) which is installed in the default path. I suppose this version of Chrome is of old version and not fully functional. The Chrome which you can manually activate is installed somewhere other than the default path, it is of the latest version, automatically upgraded, and is fully functional. I have ever experienced such situation on my PC. See the following post where you can read my previous experience.
You can check the path of the Chrome binary which is invoked by Recorder and Object Spy by looking at chromedriver.log file. Please read the following post of mine.