I hate MSN Messenger

MSN Messenger wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t feel the need to ingrain itself in every other Microsoft communications program, i.e. Outlook and Outlook Express. Scratch that - It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t require hacking the registry and unknown system config files to remove or even to just not start up when Outlook Express starts up. Alas, one must set this registry key if one does not want MSN Messenger to start when Outlook Express starts:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\Hide Messenger=2 (REG_DWORD)

I didn’t want it to not run at all, so I didn’t set some other registry keys that would prevent that or uninstall it completely. I just didn’t want it to run when Outlook Express ran…imagine that!

Continue reading » · Written on: 01-25-04 · 4 Comments »

4 Responses to “I hate MSN Messenger”

  1. simone cortesi wrote:

    thanks for the info

     January 27th, 2004 at 10:14 am
  2. marc clarke wrote:

    how do i set that dealy to get rid of msn….i’m a total computer idiot…probably should not even have one ….but for the times i guess….

     February 11th, 2004 at 10:09 pm
  3. Damon wrote:

    Check out these two registry keys:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Messenger\Client\PreventRun=1,(REG_DWORD)
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Messenger\Client\PreventAutoRun=1,(REG_DWORD)

    I snagged these out of the script over here: [http://cwashington.netreach.net/depo/view.asp?Index=711&ScriptType=vbscript] I need to make these comments a little more user-friendly one of these days.

     February 11th, 2004 at 10:32 pm
  4. Damon wrote:

    And the M$ recommended way: [http://support.microsoft.com/?id=302089]

     February 11th, 2004 at 10:36 pm

Leave a Reply