Can/does MSN messenger trigger popups?

There’s a computer here that we only use to communicate via MSN messanger to people. I don’t use it myself - it is used by a colleague who is involved in testing and needs it to talk to people on the other side of the world.

Tonight it seems to be accumulating popups out of no-where. The only program (other than TSRs) running is MSN Messenger, no browser windows or anything else. Messenger has always been running, ever since the computer was put there about a month or two ago. Yet the thing collects popups.

Is messenger causing them, or is there some new way for popups to annoy us?

Are they MSN popups, or Messenger popups? Messenger (it’s different than MSN Messenger) can be exploited on Win 2000 and XP systems.

MSN messenger and Windows messenger are different things. The recommendation is to disable Windows Mesenger.

It’s MSN messanger and it’s on Windows 2000. It can’t be disabled as it is necesary.

I was wondering if popups could be being caused by something else as (for a long time) the computer didn’t get popups (other than the ones from webpages)

But if it turns out it is due to MSN messanger then I guess we’ll have to put up with them.

If the popups are monochrome with an OK button – like a Win2k warning window – then they are probably Messenger spam. You can turn off Windows Messenger to stop them. That won’t affect Microsoft Messenger.

The popups may be cause by other things. Run Ad-Aware or Spybot to see what they find, and see about getting Pop-up Stopper or a firewall such as Zone Alarm.

When I open MSN Instant Messenger a few seconds later their homepage pops up, which I close. Never get pop-ups after that from MSN Instant Messenger.