The inability to access Yahoo email (the *free* version) from Windows Live Mail or Thunderbird on your PC  is not due to an incompatibility with Windows 7, but because Yahoo wants potential advertising revenue when you go to *their* website to retrieve your mail.      If you want to get Yahoo mail through your own reader (WLM or TB or Eudora or whatever) you need to pay for Yahoo Mail Plus.   They'll be happy to send your email to you then (without showing you add links) but you have to pay for it.  But they don't want to provide a service to you and have no prospect for making any financial return on it.   Here is the official word from Yahoo on the subject:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/mailplus/pop/pop-35.html

The 'mouse hover opens web links'  problem you report sounds like it might be a manifestation of an advertising 'feature' of many web pages these days. Are you seeing something that looks like a popup ad when you mouse over something that has a double underline?  If so,  Windows 7 again is not the culprit; it's the creative minds that have crafted the web page that are to blame.  Less feature rich browsers (like on the Blackberry) probably don't support it.  Search on Kontera  context advertising (though it might not be the one you have seen; there are other methods that are similar) for info on this.  There are some workarounds to disable it (but they involve editing your TCPIP hosts file, and may not be considered trivial if you aren't familiar with Windows).

Sounded stupid when they told me, but then again, apparently with W7 being too new, I have been having trouble finding hardly any programs of any kind that are W7 compatible, and cannot figure out, if I did happen to find a W7 compatible program, how to tell if it would be compatible with the Lenovo software on my Thinkpad as well. 

Theoretically, if is is W7 compatible, that should be the only compatibility issue, but from the Lenovo tech's answer about Thunderbird being the only ThinkPad compatible email program, and the fact that there are a couple other email programs that claim W7 compat., that tells me that there is something in the Lenovo software that limits the number of compatible programs even more.

Thunderbird 3.0 is supposed to be W7 compatible, and is the only program that Lenovo tech swore was compatible with my Thinkpad, and even it does not provide real-time audio-visual notifications when the emails come in, despite there being options for such selected by default; it appears that something in the W7 or Lenovo software is overriding this option, or there is a bug in TB keeping it from working.

Has anyone ever on a W7 Thinkpad T400 2764CTO been able to find and use a free email program that is fully compatible with both W7 and the Lenovo software, and provides:

-An inbox that can be viewed both with several email accounts from different providers consolidated in one inbox, as well as an option to view each account seperately, and be able to store them in an offline inbox.

-Real-time audio-visual notifications every time an email comes in while online.

-Being able to find or add the name of the program to the startup menu, so that it can be launched automatically at PC startup.

?

Sorry if I may be repeating myself, I just have never had a computer, new or used, or even a smartphone, that took over a month to find a compatible email program for it with those basic features.

If after a month, no one in this forum has been able to name a compatible email program with my aforementioned feature needs, then am I to assume there isn't one in existence?

As the only thing my Thinkpad can do that my Blackberry cannot, is browse Flash Media websites, and I still have to rely on BB for real-time emails notifications, I am having a huge problem justifying my mom's expense on this...thing. So, as I decide if I should just give up on this and keep waiting for Skyfire to release it's BB browser with Flash, I guess my last question would be, if I wanted to sell a month-old ThinkPad T400 2764CTO, could I get a good deal going through the Lenovo"s Business Partners reseller program, or could I likely recoup more of her losses by selling it directly myself through a newspaper, AdSheet, E-Bay, Craig's list, or something along those lines?

Thanks