Messenger popups with advertising...

[Don]

I do not know how this was turned on or if it is part of
Windows XP Messenger. About every 30 min. or so, a
message dialog pops up with advertising. The only thing
you can do is click Ok because it pops up on top of
everything, very annoying. Just now it popped up and I
pressed Ctrl-Alt-Delete to bring up the Task Mgr. and
what was active was svchost.exe and I right-clicked on
the Application svchost.exe and told it to point to the
service associated with it and it jumped to the Services
tab and highlighted CSRSS.EXE which I searched and is
located in the System32 folder/directory. Does anyone
know what this is and can I delete this file to stop
these popups.
Tks & advise,
Don

 

[Jonathan Kay [MVP]]

Greetings DOn,

Do these "pop-ups" that are appearing have "Messenger Service" in their titlebar? If so, what
you're seeing is the Messenger service built-in to Windows, *not* Windows Messenger (which
are two different things) which spammers are exploiting -- this is not Microsoft, nor can
Microsoft control them anymore then they can control spam to your e-mail inbox.

To get rid of these pop ups, you'll need to disable the "Messenger Service", click Start,
then Run, enter "services.msc"and click OK. Scroll down to "Messenger", select it,
right-click and then choose Properties. Under startup type, choose 'Disabled' and then
choose the 'Stop' button. After the service is stopped, click OK. Nothing in Windows or any
real third-party applications should be effected by this.

Just as a little reminder, make sure you've protected yourself against the latest security
issues by visiting WindowsUpdate and installing the security patches:
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com
(This isn't related to the Messenger Service in any way, just a reminder)
____________________________________________
Jonathan Kay
Microsoft MVP - Windows Messenger/MSN Messenger
Associate Expert
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/
Messenger Resources - http://messenger.jonathankay.com