Someting taking control of messenger

[Tennant]

As soon as I boot up my PC I get the MSN Messenger
saying "Select6 the person you would like to use this
feature with, and then click OK"..."Sorry none of your
contacts are online". About every 20 seconds or so
another dialog will appear exactly the same until I have
about 34 of them on top of each, then it stops. However
if I close them all down they start appearing again.

Completely uninstalling Messenger version 6.2 solves the
problem, but I want to be able to use it (installing v4.7
causes similar popups but they are "Messenger has
encountered an error..." crashes).

It looks as though a virus or something is trying to use
Messenger, but I cannot track down what it is. I have
done a full virus scan with Norton using up-to-date
definitions and also run Spybot and AdAware...all to no
avail.

Any help would be much appreciated as the PC is pretty
much unusable at the moment (it seems to interfere with
Outlook Express collecting mail) and I really don't want
to go through the pain of a clean install.

Thanks

Tennant

 

[Tennant]

I'm not sure if it's relevant, but I should also have
mentioned that in the Task Manager I am getting some
strange processes appearing. It seems to be a random hex
string 6 characters long followed by .exe(eg aea616.exe
or fa11ea.exe). However stopping this process doesn't
prevent the Messenger dialogs from appearing.

Tennant

 

[Tennant]

In case I'm not making myself clear, I've attached a
couple of screengrabs showing the problem.

http://www.cforce.co.uk/messengerproblem.jpg is before
Messenger is signed in.

http://www.cforce.co.uk/messengerproblem2.jpg shows the
difference if Messenger is online (only 4 "Select a
Contact" dialogs shown here, but a couple of minutes
later there will be 34 of them as per previous screengrab.

http://www.cforce.co.uk/messengerproblem3.jpg shows what
happens when you click on OK with a contact highlighted.

Hopefully this will shed a light on something!

Tennant