IE 7 sticking its nose in

Running XP pro/sp3. If I open DO and try to install a program, I get a popup from IE7 asking if I want to run the program. I don't know exactly when this started to happen, but now I am trying to figure it out.
Firefox is default browser. Anyone have any idea where I could look ?

Thanks

Firefox is default browser. Anyone have any idea where I could look ?

Just found the open with IE for an exe file. What should it be ?

Isn't there an "Always ask before opening this file" checkbox in the warning dialog? Just clear that and the warnings will no longer appear.

The warnings are triggered by a flag being set on individual exe files at the time they were downloaded or extracted from a zip that had the same sort of flag. (Not all programs set the flag. Explorer and Internet Explorer both do but not much else does.)

I tried that before and it didn't stick. Dougknox mvp had a registry fix for file associations which seems to have corrected the issue, at the moment.
Will have to see what happens in the future.

Thanks