Hobo
I was having the same problems for a couple of days. I connect to Hotmail from HOTMAIL inscribed on my Links bar. A few days ago when I did this, a dialogue box started appearing asking for my user name and password in order to sign into NETWORK PASSPORT. Whenever I did this, Hotmail would open on the Compose page. Very annoying!
Solved it by typing "www.hotmail.com" in the address bar. After I did that, Hotmail has been opening normally. Deleted the original Hotmail in the links bar and added the new one. So far, after about 5 days now, everything seems to be back to normal.
However, I am getting frequent "server busy" messages after new pages within Hotmail take a long time to load.
Hope this helps.