Quote Originally Posted by AndyBoyUK View Post
I can only assume that Web Designer MX Premium (v8) has changed settings which have had an effect on WD7 Prem.
No, it does not change any settings of earlier versions.

You may dislike Internet Explorer and that's perfectly fine, but if you are creating a website to publish on the web, then like it or not other people will be viewing your site using IE, this is a fact - so ensuring that your site looks and functions fine in IE is only to your own benefit.
As already mentioned, Xara's preview window uses comparability mode of your installed IE and cannot be changed, but you can instantly preview in your preferred browser as well, you should not have to reinstall Windows 7 to upgrade to IE9 unless your windows installation is also broken.
There should be no reason to close the program to view the widgets, just press the Firefox icon on the preview window.
Alternatively rather than previewing, just export your site to a folder and double-click the index.htm, that will load your default web browser yes?