Well you may notice that nobody uses the old Windows Messenger anymore, this is because it is abandon-ware, its no longer updated or maintained by Microsoft. This is because we all use MSN Messenger, Messenger Live or third party software (trillian or such).

I often see people signing onto messenger (MSN), first without a picture on their profile (this is windows messenger), then they go offline (MSN Messenger starts and signs them out), then they sign in with a picture on their profile. They will then get a notification saying “somebody has signed in from another location”.

In addition to this, if you disable or uninstall any other messenger service, you’ll find that Windows Messenger will signin, and people will be talking to you, but you can’t find your messenger window to signout or get rid of them.

This is why Windows Messenger is annoying.

And most importantly with the beta releases of Messenger Live (8.0), and of course the upstanding MSN Messenger (7.5) nobody really wants the annoying Windows Messenger (4.5), yet most people seem to have difficulties disabling windows messenger.

So how do I disable it?

Please note: This will not affect MSN Messenger or Messenger Live AT ALL.

Firstly I think the most important thing is to disable it from within, kill it at the settings…

Go to Start > Run, enter: “C:\Program Files\Messenger\msmsgs.exe”.

By doing that, you will force Windows Messenger to open.

Go to Tools > Options.

Inside the options you’ll be faced with the general options, click on the “Preferences” tab, and disabling Windows Messenger is as simple as unticking:

“Run Windows Messenger when Window starts” – This will stop it from starting up again.
“Allow Windows Messenger to run in the background” – This will stop it from being so annoying!

Note: At this point another little trick I do to stop Messenger from trying to connect is in the Proxy settings, I set the proxy server to “1″, and the port to “1″, obviously it is VERY unlikely that this server will ever exist and therefore will never connect.

Press “OK”.

You then need to kill the process, so open Task Manager by hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL (on your keyboard), and look for “msmsgs.exe”, then click: “End Process”, then click “Yes” when the message appears.

The next thing to do is make sure its completely disabled and no one can access it in the future, even by mistake.

Go to Start > Run, enter: “C:\Program Files\”.

Find a folder named “Messenger”, rename it to “MessengerOFF”, if it asks a question, hit “Yes”.

Thats it! All done! No more annoying Windows Messenger!

PS. We’re not talking about the Windows Messenger Service, you can find out how to Disable the windows messenger service in Windows XP on the Microsoft website. I recommend doing this if you haven’t already done so.

Related posts:

1. How to restart the explorer shell in Windows XP If you have landed yourself here chances are you already...
2. Correct Documents and Settings folder on Windows 2000 Today I get a frantic call from a client who’s...
3. Changing your Windows XP Product Key Its not very often I have to do this, but...
4. How to Print to a Text File Device Manager does not have a Save command available for...

My solution to this was to use an existing platform that allowed multiple users, which was IRC. The next step was to create a “bot” that would connect to the MSN Messenger network and relay the information back and forth.

Originally due to my skills in coding in mIRC I decided to code a very simple MSN messenger client. This proved quite a challenge after looking at the MSN Messenger Protocol Docs. I decided to check out existing MSN messenger clients for mIRC and see how they had done it.

I tried roughly 5 from mircscripts.org, none of them worked apart from MSNMIRC by Artweks.

I decided to strip this down and allow relaying via remotely triggered commands, I codenamed this script “xmsn”. This worked very well for quite some time, until MSN decided to change the way their older protocols work, which meant they now required SSL to authenticate.

It took some time to figure out, but eventually the script was fully functional again with the addition of a DLL (ssl.dll – 58kb), however it seemed that this DLL would only work on some machines, yet not others, this meant I required a new machine to run one mIRC bot.

I ran this for some time, probably around a year, and decided that running a whole machine just for on mIRC based bot was a bit of a waste, so I decided to investigate my options.

Eggdrop was my first port of call, using some kind of TCL script that could connect to the MSN protocol would be fantastic, yet this did not appear to exist, however I did locate an MSN messenger client called aMSN, which was based on TCL. There were some issues with this though, firstly it is not eggdrop based, fine I thought i’ll strip it down, secondly there is no console mode, its a 100% GUI application, therefore a BIG task. I simply didn’t have the time to deal with this complexity.

After some further searching I discovered the BitlBee project, which is in itself an amazing project and an amazing idea. In principle its an IRCd that can connect to many popular instant messenger protocols such as MSN messenger.

The idea was to somehow run an eggdrop that would connect to a BitlBee server, connect to MSN, and relay the details to another IRCd using a relay tcl script. Obviously the relay script would also need the ability to accept triggers from the other IRCd so the users can control it and send messages, etc.

An alternative idea would be to use psyBNC with multiuser enabled, even though this method would probably be more secure, i’d prefer to use the eggdrop method.

In the end I decided to trim down a version of linkchan.tcl, which I had used before over the years and so was already fimilar with its structure and functionatility. This offers me a fantastic platform to base this project on.

There is the project research so far, the next step is to release bitlbee.tcl once i’m happy the script is stable.

Update: I have posted a beta version of the “bitlbee.tcl” under the eggdrop tcl section.

Related posts:

1. How to Disable Windows Messenger Why would you want to disable Windows Messenger? Well you...
2. Why I registered mIRC For those that don’t know… mIRC is communication software,...
3. Setting up a FreeBSD socks proxy server for use with mIRC I’m getting fed up with my current IRC BNC software....
4. Recording an IRC channel on Windows Recently Matt Cutts posted an article on his blog about...