MSN Messenger

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi,
I recently installed avast home 4.0. Yesterday I had some problems with the mail scanner (which I ended up disabling). Today and yesterday evening when I booted up my computer everything runs fine except MS Messenger. Task manager shows that msmsgs.exe is running but no icon is in the system tray. I have tried ending the process and restarting Messenger, but it still doesn’t appear. Is avast blocking this in some way or is my problem elsewhere.

Without Messenger running properly it also takes Outlook Express about 10 min to start up so this problem is very annoying.

Thanks for any help the forum can give.

2

I hope you mean avast! 4.1, because 4.0 is quiet old now…

3

yeah, Home 4.1, sorry for the confusion

4

You can disable the messenger from loading in OE.

5

If you don’t want Messenger in any way, you can uninstall it through
Control Panel > Add/Remove programs > Add/Remove Windows compontents > Windows Messenger (generally, the last one).

You can use Shoot The Messenger too (http://grc.com/files/shootthemessenger.exe).
To disable into Outlook, just Tools > Options.

6

I actually am one of those few that use it. Okay, this is what I did and it seems to work: I found out that Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger are different programs with different features, but the same looking system tray icon. Windows Messenger was fubar for some reason that I can’t explain - it does have a lot of program sharing features that I don’t use and possibly avast was blocking them. I found a Microsoft Site that taught how to remove Windows Messenger and install MSN Messenger in its place. Outlook Express loads up just fine now and so does MSN Messenger.

http://www.mvps.org/marksxp/WindowsXP/messenger/messenger.php

7

Glad to hear the problem is solved. :smiley: