This happens because those individual programs doesn't respect your settings in Windows. In other words, sloppy programming in most cases. It (basically) works like this: * You set a default browser in Windows * Whenever a program needs to open a website, it simply sends the URL to visit to Windows * Windows opens the link using the default browser But some programmers instead calls a specific program, and there are very few ways to prevent this - Windows will do as its told by the program and cannot override such calls. You can test this yourself: Open Start -> Run... , enter a web address (like 'http://google.com', without the quotes) and press enter. That's the correct way to call up a browser with a given URL. What these programs usually do, is specifically call up IE to open the URL. You can just as easily test this yourself: Open Start -> Run... , enter iexplore and a web address (like 'iexplore http://google.com', without the quotes) and press enter. Now IE opens the address. So in short, '''yes''', URLs should always be opened with your default browser, but not all programmers respect this and thus forces use of IE. And this seems to be the case with the programs you're having this issue with. There '''are''' ways to hack your way around this problem, but they can be somewhat dangerous - like serious problems running Windows Update. I will not recommend doing this unless you're willing to take the risk of causing problems for yourself! But if you keep this warning in mind, it is possible to completely relpace iexplore.exe with Firefox; here's a [http://www.google.com/search?q=replace+iexplore.exe+with+firefox Google search on articles replacing IE with Firefox] (see the MozillaZine.org forum debate and the ForeverGeek.com links to learn how and what problems and dangers this entails). I hope this answers your question. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.