Messenger problems......

Something popping up for a downloadable fix sounds suspicious to me ...

Disable messenger
Go to the START menu, Select Run and type in services.msc and click OK.

Now a new window will appear with lots of "services" on the right hand side...

Scroll down and find the Messenger service, select it, right click it and choose properties.

.

Under Startup Type select Manual. (or Disabled)

Then click the Stop button.

Then click the Apply button.

Then click the OK button.

Messenger Service Spam can no longer be received on your machine....

However you will now no longer receive legitimate net send or alerter messages either, but for most folk this is not going to be a problem. If you are using a NAT router to access the Internet then you will be immune to these Messenger Service Spam popups as they can only be received by public IP addresses and NOT the private IP addresses that NAT routers use for internal networks.

Likewise if you are using Windows XP Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) only the "gateway" PC should get the Messenger Service Spam popups as the other PC will be getting private IP addresses from the ICS service... (Just in case you are wondering private IP addresses usually look something like: 192.168.xxx.xxx)

Also installing a personal "Firewall" on your PC will offer you protection too