IE oddness

I use the Win7 mouse focusing feature. It works great for me now that I have the delays adjusted. Place the cursor anywhere over any window and that window comes promtly to the front ... except I.E.

To get I.E. to come into focus the cursor must hover over the taskbar, which rather defeats the purpose since often times that portion is under another window! Way to go MS when you can't even get your own features to work with your own programs. To the plus ... Firefox is just fine.

Second thing; FF is set as my default browser, but ANY link that begins with www.microsoft still opens I.E. Any way around that?