Category: Windows

This is a very simple hack to get rid of the annoying adverts in Windows Live Messenger (and possibly older versions of MSN Messenger). It doesn’t involve any downloads or patches and the change is simple to reverse if it doesn’t work, or it causes problems which it shouldn’t.

Note that I have nothing against the adverts as such. It’s a great communication tool and MS are well within their rights to sell some advertising space on it. Generally I tune them out, but the “rollover to pop up” ones are a complete pain in the backside. It’s for these I went searching for a solution – and found three on DotNetWizard.net.

That post above lists three solutions. I found that the first did the job for me and I’ll sum it up in brief here.

1. Open My Computer or Windows Explorer
2. Navigate to C:/Windows/System32/Drivers/etc
3. Right click on “hosts” and select “Properties”. If the file is read-only, remove that tick and Apply if necessary
4. Double-click on “hosts” and when the window appears, choose to open it with Notepad
5. Near the top of the file you’ll see an entry “127.0.0.1 localhost”. Underneath that, add a new line “127.0.0.1 rad.msn.com”
6. File … Save then exit Notepad
7. If the file was read-only before, make it read-only again.
8. Log out of MSN if you were in it, and back in.

You should now find that the ads are replaced with a blank white box. Not pretty, but at least you don’t end up with adverts obscuring your desktop. This works on XP and Vista. I don’t know about Windows 7 as yet, sorry, though I assume it has the same file structure and use of hosts.

For the techies, how this works is pretty simple. All the adverts from Microsoft are served up via a server located at the end of the web address “rad.msn.com”. The hosts file is a plain text system file which tells the system where to look for certain resources – it’s a single-machine version of the DNS system in some respects.

As well as using it to point at local resources (such as 192.168.0.7 Steve_PC) you can get it to redirect any other network request. All we’ve done is told the machine that when Messenger goes looking for the advert server, it should – instead of heading out into the internet – look to the local 127.0.0.1 address. This is a standard “loop back” address used by all PCs (indeed, all networking equipment). Hence, Messenger can’t reach the server and the ads don’t appear.

Microsoft could easily fix this by hard-coding an IP address for the advert server into an WLM update, though this in turn could be blocked using other methods, such as firewalls.

Right now, though, I don’t have someone trying to sell me coffee every time I try to click on an icon in my tray.