Re: OT: windoze woes and full rant mode is on

Charles Hottel wrote:

Lowest Amount of Aggravation: MSN Messenger

I hate the MSN Messenger icon in my system tray. Microsoft Defender removed it but it came
back. I stopped Outlook from starting it. Defender still thought it was gone so I used
msconfig to remove it from startup. It came back. I went to Outlook 2002 to try and stop it
from starting it. The help said: Tools, Options, Preferences should get me to the place to
turn it off. Except there is no Preferences tab. PC Magazine said to try: Tools, Options,
General. Yes the option is there and checked. All I need to do is uncheck it. Only it is
grayed out or yellowed out and I can't change it. PC Magazine said try: Start, Run then

RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove

but it said to be sure not to type any spaces as it could lead to unpredictable results, only
the string does contain spaces.

I remember recently going through the same agony after MS Messenger started to mysteriously appear in my taskbar, with no apparent means of altering its startup options. And I found both of the PC Magazine tips to have the inaccuracies you've noted (I think the "no spaces" bit was intended to mean "don't add any spaces where the line breaks due to print column width".

But after several tries I was able to discover how to stop Outlook (in my case Outlook 2003) from starting up that rascally messenger. The option is named "enable person smart name tags" or something like that, on the tools,other tab. Just what that has to do with it is beyond me, but as long as it did the job that's all I care about.

.... not looking forward to the IE7 agony, as every time I startup it asks me to download and install.
.

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