Flash email link from exe, bleed-through links

Hi,
I have 2 questions plagueing me at the moment.

1. I'm creating an exe from Flash and am having problems with getting an email link to open Email editor without launching Internet Explorer too.
I've used the old getUrl... mailto:[email protected]. It works - as in it opens Outlook express with email address in place, but it launches IE too - which is the part I don't want.

2. In the exe is a main page with links that load swf's into level 2. Which all works fine but if you move your cursor over the image in the swf it detects the links from the level below and turns into the hand cursor. All swf's have a background layer so I don't understand why it picks up links in bottom level.
Is there some way I can put something over the images in the swf's and then hide the cursor in that area? mouse.hide() seems not to work out very well.

Please - any help on questions above would be appreciated