Hi Grandpaw,
Hope you enjoyed your nap. I have one every afternoon.
Do you mind if I say, "I wonder if you are reading too much into this "default" business"?
You do? Ahh well. Sorry. But I wonder if you're reading too much into this "Default" business, 
Windows is a wonderful thing. No really, I mean it. For all its minor faults, when we have it running well, it is truly marvelous. And I have learned from these forums and others that when it is not running well, it is usually saying something like, "Hey you, you've messed me up. Come and fix it!". Meaning more often than not it is us who make the errors, not Windows.
It is wonderful in so many ways, and many of them are subtle. For instance, I have 3 different players on my desktop. Not the players themselves, just the shortcuts to the main programs. They will play my music, or my videos. They are Windows Media Player, and Creative PlayCenter for music, and Windows Media Player, (again), Zoom Player, and DivX Player for my videos.
The subtlety is how I can use them to play files. EG, I want to play Pink Floyd's music track, "Another Brick in the Wall". I can either;
1] Find the file in Windows Explorer and double click it, or
2] Open up WMP or Creative PlayCenter, go to File > Open, navigate to where the track is, highlight it and click Play, (Or Open), or
3] In Windows Explorer, I can "Drag" the file across the screen, out of Windows Explorer, and "drop" it into the player shortcut on my desktop. The player will open like magic, playing my track. Did you know you could do that? or
4] If my player is already open, I can drag the file out of Windows Explorer, and drop it into the player window, or,
5] If the player is open but minimised to an icon on the taskbar at the bottom, I can drag the file out of Windows Explorer, and onto the taskbar icon. I don't let go but hold onto it. Then the player will open up from the taskbar, and then I can release the mouse, and the track will play.
If the track has a shortcut on my desktop, scrap Windows Explorer, I can just drag the desktop shortcut.
"All very interesting", I hear you say, "but what is your point?" you might continue.
My point is that Windows can do things, the same things, in many different ways. Take my browsers. I have 3 browsers. IE6, Netscape 7.1 and Firefox.
I don't have url shortcuts on my desktop, but I have done in the past. If I wanted to open a url, (a web page for people who read this and perhaps don't know what a url is), I would double click it, and my default browser would open it. Usually that was Netscape. But very often, I didn't want it open in Netscape. So, I would open up IE, and "drag" the url shortcut into the IE window, and the web page would open up.
I could have both browsers open, and both minimised to the taskbar. I could thyen choose which browser to drag the shortcut to. I would drag it to the minimised icon on the toolbar, wait a second for the browser I chose to open up, then release the mouse inside the open window.
One thing Windows doesn't do for browsers. I cannot drag a url shortcut to a browser shortcut icon on the desktop. It doesn't always work.
So what am I saying? As long as all my browsers work, I am not too bothered which one is the default browser. I'm in charge, not Windows and I choose which browser I want to use when I want it.
Is there any reason that you cannot think along the same lines Grandpaw? You don't have to bother with which browser is your default browser. You could set Firefox as the default in preference to IE because of IE's known security weaknesses, and then just forget about it. If you do want to use IE, just use it. Open it up, and drag the url into the open window.
Now, if you're saying that IE is now not working properly, that's a different matter, and perhaps you might need IEFIX. But are you sure its the browser and not your own concern about "which is default and which isn't"?
Let me know what you think?
Mark