The problems all started about 2 weeks ago. All of a sudden, we started getting these pop ups appearing. They look like proper system windows with the blue bit at the top which usually has “system message” in it and the main body of the window is grey. The writing is all black and they advertise products to stop pop-ups (and other things). There is an OK button (which of course I never press) and an X in the top right hand corner.
I am running XP home edition and I rolled it back to the previous days “backup” settings (because XP says it backs everything up once a day) but that did not help. I had not installed any new software, but had recently had trouble with my modem, so I had bought a new one. I installed it and the driver, but found out it was the network cable, so I am back on my old modem with the new one just sitting there redundant.
I have tried downloading and running spybot, but that did not solve the problem. I don’t know enough to go rooting round in the registry or anything like that.
Right on Q.E.D. the instructions on the site you mentioned WILL fix the message window problem. I had the same thing happen to me a few weeks ago, I found the site you mentioned, disabled Windows Messaging, now everything works fine. Man, you talk about ANNOYING, this message pop-up thing is maddening. It’s not like browser pop-ups that just kind of get in the way, with this messaging pop-ups, you MUST click one of it’s buttons to continue using your system, it demands your attention and takes control of you system. If I could only find out who’s sending these nasty little messages I would raid their office and smash their servers into little pieces with a baseball bat.
Also I would look into running a local firewall if you do not already do so.
Spybot is a great program to run along with Adaware. You should also run the Microsoft program called regclean to clean out your registry from time to time. There is another program which you can use called TDS-3 http://tds.diamondcs.com.au/ < I actually paid for this product and a few of the other ones which came with it. It has continually found trojans, backdoor, viruses etc before or even if the other products would of.
The windows messaging problem which you have just come across has occured on my PC once, but then I did disable the service. Not much use on my local workgroup setup.