Has Yahoo Messenger TOTALLY screwed up my computer??

Downloaded it and tried to use it, but it slowed down my computer so much I had to get rid of it. Thing is, the computer is still ridiculously slow. Have gotten rid of every part of Y! Msgr with Add/Remove, defragged, scanned disk, virus scanned, cleaned up the memory, deleted Temp Internet Files, NOTHING has helped. Somebody mentioned trying getting rid of Cookies, but I cant see how that would be the trouble, and there arent many cookies anyway.

Internet is terribly slow, taking forever to load a page, and very often giving me “Error - page cannot be displayed”…links hardly ever work the first time. These are pages I frequent and they never were this slow before…it was never this bad before I got Y! Msgr.

What else can I try? It is an old slow Dell laptop, but it has NEVER been this slow. And if you give me a possible solution, PLEASE tell me HOW to do it…not all of us as computer literate as YOU are!!!

Thanx…

And if you mods gripe that this has been covered before, it would literally take HOURS for me to do a simple search thru the boards.