Like most people I suppose running IE7, I have a set of Tabs that I have set up to be my home page.

I'd know if I'd changed that set and I haven't. However for the past few startups I've been getting uk.msn.com (My "locality" for IE is set to getting news from the UK so the Finnish languages pages many sites insist on showing me ignore me sometimes) as my first tab instead of www.wssfaq.com which should by rights be there.

Looking back at it now (after several times of thinking I was seeing things) I realise that there are two things that might have caused this - and both, not surprisingly given what the tab has been changed to, come from Microsoft.

One is that I was in Hotmail and I told it that it could switch me from the Old Hotmail to the new, improved "Hotmail on Microsoft Live".

The second is that I have this Vista machine (contrary to my usual policy which is download upgrades but don't install) set to automatic upgrades.

(This by the way is mostly OK except for its nasty happy of wanting to boot my machine by popping up a (usually hidden) pop-up and then, instead of waiting for me to approve of the re-boot it says is necessary, it starts a 10(?) minute countdown and then just re-boots. One time that messed up the very final stages of a running the SharePoint configuration wizard for MOSS (in a VM). To say I was not amused would be an understatement.)

Anyway ... When starting this piece I thought this grabbing my first IE7 tab was caused by one of those automatic updates. Now I'm thinking (given what it put in place of the first tab) it was that Hotmail change.

But just what gives Microsoft the right to decide what I want to have on my first tab just because I decided to change from old HotMail to new, improved formula HotMail?

Yes, I'm p****d.