Glad to see your problem's been fixed, jsndean. This happened to me too awhile back, and I was able to fix it. But I didn't want it to happen again. I found a lil program called StartPage Guard. It's pretty cool, and free.
http://www.pjwalczak.com/spguard/index.php
You set your startpage on it. And if the startpage changes, it pops up a little box notifying you of the change. If you don't want that new startpage, it will reset it back to your chosen one.