Help bubbles and Pop-ups

[Drumma]

Does anyone know how to stop those annoying bubbles
appearing at the bottom of the screen? "You are not
connected to the server. You may continue working
normally". Brilliant. Why would I need to be told that I
can continue working? What genius came up with that?
I no longer care if I can continue working normally or
abnormally, I don't care what upgrades are availible to
me or whether I'm connected to a server or not, etcetc.
Does anyone know how to turn these things off?

Also I've been plagued by message pop-ups. I never use
messaging and I've even got rid of M'soft Messanger. Does
anyone know stop these coming through too?
Thanks
Drumma

 

[purplehaz]

When do you see that message? Are you on a network with a server? If so are
you losing connection with it?

For your pop-ups:

Secure your hacker prone computer:

If they say messenger service in the title bar, these pop ups have nothing
to do with MSN messenger or Windows messenger. What this is a new way for
spammers to attack your computer and send you pop-up ads. If you receive
these ads it means that your computers netbios ports are wide open to the
internet and this could be a real security problem. What you should do is
install a good firewall that will block the ports the spammers use and stop
the ads. A good place to start is Zone Alarm ( www.zonelabs.com ) for an
inbound/outbound blocking firewall or use the inbound blocking only firewall
built in to XP. If needed configure the firewall to block ports 135, 137-139
and 445. Zone Alarm will block these ports by default.

Use this site to test some of your ports security:
https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

You can/should also disable the messenger service, which is the service the
spammers exploit, but it isn't needed to stop the ads and disabling the
service will not block the open netbios ports.

Note: If the Messenger service is stopped, messages from the Alerter
service (notifications from your antivirus software, for example) are
not transmitted. If the Messenger service is turned off, any services
that explicitly depend on the Messenger service do not start, and an
error message is logged in the System event log. For this reason,
Microsoft recommends that you install a firewall and configure it to
block NetBIOS and RPC traffic instead of turning off the Messenger
service. To turn off the service goto, control panel, administrative tools,
services, find messenger, right click, properties, hit the stop button, set
startup type to manual or disabled. (be sure to stay patched at windows
update as well)

If the pop-ups appear while surfing web pages then download and install one
of the many pop-up blocker programs. Search www.download.com for popup
blocker, you'll find many free ones.

Also get a good spyware cleaner:

Spybot - http://www.safer-networking.org/

Ad-aware - http://www.lavasoft.com

 

[Plato]

Does anyone know how to stop those annoying bubbles
appearing at the bottom of the screen? "You are not
http://www.bootdisk.com/bootlist/139.htm#1

Also I've been plagued by message pop-ups. I never use

http://www.bootdisk.com/xptop10.htm#3