I have been struggling to open hotmail from MSN messengers "My E-Mail inbox" and Firefoxes Tools > Read Mail WITHOUT Internet explorer opening.
After much surfing I thought I had found the answer. Install Messenger Plus and the plugin StuffPlug for Messenger Plus. Set open links using default browser and bob's your uncle......
it didn't work kept getting an error when setting open links in stuffplug
Well by this stage I was pretty p*ssed as I really want to kill IE and expect that the reason it didn't work is SP2 or M$ and the way IE is part of windows so I did this,
Open Firefox. Go to Hotmail, Sign in and check the box "automatically sign me in". Then highlight the address bar (all of it) and drag it to the desktop.
Viola - double click desktop icon and up pops Hotmail in FF. I then dragged this icon to my quick launch bar and there you have it, 1 click to Hotmail using FF from the desktop.
P.S. I'm sure that someone somewhere will have done this before me but I'm still pretty pleased with myself and thought that others might find this useful.