Jim,
I think that though IE may have the largest market share at the moment, it is slowly losing it, as many people realise that it is horribly insecure and frankly lagging behind other competing browsers. It is slower, less user friendly, less adaptable less everything essentially in my opinion. The only thing it has going for it is that it is integrated into the windows shell.
There is a big flaw in your argument, which is that because most people use IE it should be used as the de facto standard. Yet we allready have open standards, which is the reason why standards groups exist, they are there to make sure that there is an open standard that all browsers can conform to so that web designers can make one page and feel confidant that there will be a fairly similiar experience regardless of the browser one happens to be using.
The problem with IE is that the development team through arrogance or just ineptitude does not feel as though IE should have to implement these standards as they are set out.
Do you honestly suggest that the firefox development team should have to reverse engineer IE in order to work out how they have missimplemented an open standard, so that they can comply with the "IE Standard"? The standard is there for people to comply with. Browser developers have access to it so that they can implement it as accurately as possible and web developers have access to it so that the can design standards compliant sites. Surely no one should have to go through microsoft in order to develop a competing browser or a webpage for that matter.
By the way thanks for taking care of the reg issue it worked perfectly.