Two open & working catalogs in Lightroom 5.5

Is this a new feature or a bug? I was reviewing my students catalogs and when opening a new catalog the other one does not close. Now mostly there was some message first that went away afterwards, and in two occasions the "background" catalog gave an error, but a couple of times I could just switch between the two catalogs and they were both functioning. I must say it is convenient when reviewing
I was opening the catalogs from a rather slow external USB 2,0 drive. I've included screenshots.
For reviewing I use AnyFilter PlugIn by John R Ellis, so not sure if that could cause it?
Any Filter Lightroom Plugin
PC specs under the images
Operating System
  Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
CPU
  Intel Core i7 930 @ 2.80GHz 48 °C
  Bloomfield 45nm Technology
RAM
  12,0GB Triple-Channel DDR3 @ 535MHz (8-8-8-20)
Motherboard
  ASUSTeK Computer INC. P6T DELUXE V2 (LGA1366) 51 °C
Graphics
  DELL U2711 (2560x1440@59Hz)
  PLB2712HDS (1920x1080@59Hz)
  1279MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 (EVGA) 72 °C
Storage
  1863GB VIDEO (RAID)
  1863GB Seagate ST2000DM001-9YN164 (SATA) 27 °C
  139GB Western Digital WDC WD1500HLFS-01G6U1 (SATA) 25 °C

Interesting. I tried (not very hard, granted) to duplicate this feat and didn't make it happen on Win 7, 64-bit.
Having two copies of LR running on two separate catalogues probably wouldn't mess you up. Running twice at the same time against one catalogue would be a recipe for disaster, and LR is pretty good at not allowing that to happen..
The Hacker Dictionary would probably call what you saw a mis-wart: something that ought to be a bug but turned out to be a feature.
Hal

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