I have a Dell PC (with XP) that I got last December. I also use AOL dial up for internet use.
While online, I get these EXTREMELY annoying “Grey” colored message boxes that pop up every several minutes. Allot of them are for unrelated; Allot of them are for “messageblocker.com” et al. It says the reason that I am getting them is because my IP address is “leaking”.
I dont want to go to messageblocker.com for the solution because they are one of the problems!
How do I stop this leak??? Is this an AOL thing or a XP thing? None of my other PCs or ISPs with other configurations have had this problem.
When I read “messageblocker.com” I was suspicious and visited the site–indeed, it provides information about various pop-up stopping software. The supposed leak is not the problem; this is just another one of those lovely error message scams. A good way to stop them is simply to install this type of software–this will stop all the other annoying ads as well. I’m not sure what’s the best version; I’ll leave that to other posters.
This is messageblocker.com shamelessly lying to you. You are getting these popups through the Windows Messenger Service, which was originally designed to let administrators of company networks warn users of impending maintenance and other things of that sort. To stop messenger popups, go to start, run, type “services.msc” without quotes, and press enter. This will pop up the XP services control panel. Scroll down to Messenger, right click on it, and choose “properties.” Click the “stop” button, then click on the “Startup type” menu and choose “disabled.” Click the apply and OK buttons, and then close the window. This should stop all of that annoying spam.
You weren’t leaking anything, most likely. Think of the messages as just a different form of those flashing banner ads that say “YOUR INTERNET MAY BE TOO SLOW CLICK TO SPEED IT UP!!!11”.
No, the messenger service does not leak any information out. Disabling it just prevents people from being able to send you these bogus messages.
Note that the service you’re concerned about is not called “Windows Messenger”, but rather simply “Messenger Service.” Windows Messenger is something else entirely.
This part is also completely idiotic. Everyone directly connected to the Internet has their IP address “leaking out”. It is unavoidable. The messenger spammers just send messages to any and all IP addresses, one at a time.
Your IP address won’t “leak out” if you are behind a gateway/router/firewall where your actual computer’s IP is not the same as the router’s.
I’m not sure that the Messenger service is involved. I’ve had similar messages and they are actually browser windows designed to look like Windows event message boxes. This will entirely block those.
Thanks for all the replies. I followed Alereon’s advice (PERFECT step by step instructions!) and that seemed to have stopped the annoying messages so far.
Leaking is just a nasty sounding word for saying that your IP address can be read by someone on the internet. This is not a problem. IP addresses wouldn’t work if the internet couldn’t read them - whether it’s a firewall assigned IP address from an NAT or your own home IP address assigned by your ISP.
The problem lies with idiots them trying to hack your PC when they’ve got your IP address.
