Microsoft is not playing nice with Lotus again

Vista pc, perfectly fine. Microsoft forces down some updates, my laptop reboots on its own!
I told it to download, never told it to reboot by itself!

Fine, I can live with it.

BUT WAIT! Now every mailto URL goes to Outlook! What happenned to all my Lotus pointers.
Poof! Gone!

And to make it worse, YOU CAN NOT browse to add a extension or reference if it's a Microsoft piece of software. So although Notes is registered into my PC, the Office 2007 SP1 evidently wiped it out of the registry.
And will not even admit Lotus it is loaded on my pc(I also have R3,4,5,6,7 as well as standard 8) so any of them would be fine.
But no way to select MY preference of an email program.
Just because Outlook is installed, does not mean I want to use it for real.

So I have to go dig out the utility I found, I posted about it previously, to correct this.
Someone out there tell me this is normal?
How can they blatantly prevent me from using my preferred mail client software?

How far does this go, if I used Thunderbird does it block me out as well?
This is just wrong!