Hello and welcome, allenaaker!

In principle, there is nothing wrong with posting here, but it is better to start a question at Seekers of Perl Wisdom, as then many more people will see it.

To your two questions:

1. The object returned into $IE is a special object that tries to behave mostly like a normal Perl object, but in fact, it is some magical C object that cannot really be inspected. It interfaces to the InternetExplorer.Application object of Windows resp. the Internet Explorer browser.

2. To find information about the InternetExplorer.Application, see the documentation by Microsoft. There is no Perl specific documentation, but it is not hard to translate the examples in VB into Perl.