OE annoyance

Outlook Express alert pops up saying that OE isn’t the default email. Well, It’s the only email client on the machine with 1 business account set up. How do you set it to default when it is already the default and the account options indicates that 1 account is set to default?
Another nagging pain is the fact that when OE is opened you have to manually click send/recieve to get emails to download. I pretty well exhausted myself looking at the options/prefs/settings pages with no luck on both of these.