Help please -Vista

[ecchi]

I have been forced by my mobile ISP to use Vista on my laptop, which is driving me mad. Most problems I will probably work out eventually or learn to live with, but one I kind of need to sort out urgently is:

How do you make Vista treat .shtml pages on the hard drive in the same way it treats .html? I have "associated the file type" with Explorer, so in theory I should be able to double click on a web page's name in Windows Explorer to get the page to open in a new browser window. However what happens is that the page opens for less than a second then closes. What I am guessing is that it treats .shtml files as programs; runs them then closes down. Obviously I need the browser window to stay open so I can work on it.

Also (less importantly) is it possible to tell Explorer not to load flash in a page, because my mobile broadband is very slow at times and flash kills page loading speed (for example, sometimes a thread on this board will take several minutes to load simply because there is a flash banner at the top).