You heard incorrectly. XP has no such feature to stop website popups.
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.
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