Advance and Be Mechanized

The general comments I made for Windows Media Player goes for Microsoft’s Windows Messenger. It indeed replicates like a virus when you try to remove it.

I think it’s no surprise that among my friends and acquaintances the least tech-savvy tend to use Windows Messenger and the more er... smart will use Yahoo Messenger or, better yet, Gaim or Trillian (good, I just insulted some people).

So for some reason I needed to use Instant Messenger and I installed it with some aversion. Now I had it started up and running since I log on to Windows.

Like in the Media Player case, the way to fix this is to change the options settings, which this time is where everybody would expect: menu tools -> Options and in the Preferences tab, uncheck “Run this program when Windows starts”.

But let’s see the behavior of this little beast when we try to shut it down or delete it. If for instance I try to close Messenger, a message appears saying: “There are other applications currently using features provided by Windows Messenger. You must close these other applications before you can exit Windows Messenger. These applications may include Outlook, Outlook Express, MSN explorer, and Internet Explorer”. Well, that’s seems false in my case, since I don’t have any of those programs running (I use Firefox and Thunderbird instead), even if I go to the Task Manager and close all non-essential processes, the message insists there’s some application using Messenger. I doubt it.

The messenger program is called msmsgs.exe and in my computer is under the Program Files\Messenger folder. If we delete that file, Windows will automatically reproduce it in a clear viral behavior. (For some reason now I couldn’t repeat this action; I must have messed around too much).

Finally, we can try another experiment. Even when Messenger is not running, we can check with the Task Manager (Ctr+Alt+Del, Processes tab) that msmsgs.exe will start in the background when we log into Hotmail, and this happens even if we selected not to run it in the background from its options. But the funny thing is that after we log out of Hotmail and close the browser, the Messenger process doesn’t finish but it just stays there for who knows what reason.