How to Stop Windows Messenger from Running or Starting Up on Reboot

If you are like me and cannot stand that little icon popping up in the right-hand corner of your screen every time you reboot or turn on your computer, then you will be glad to use the following method to remove Windows Messenger from the startup menu.

Another annoying thing that Windows does is startup Windows Messenger when you open Microsoft Outlook Express. This is why people are unsuccessful when they try to remove Messenger by going into the Services menu and stopping the Messenger service, as well as disabling it from there also. What happens is that when Outlook Express starts, it runs the Messenger executable thus opening Messenger. Well, the method I am going to show you will also prevent that from happening, without slowing down the startup of Microsoft Outlook Express.

You will need to do two steps if you want to remove Messenger and modify the registry so that Outlook Express doesn't take forever to load afterwards. If you don't ever use Outlook Express, then you can just do the first step if you want. My suggestion is to do both steps regardless, because you never know when you might need to open Outlook Express in the future.

Note: Before doing any of these steps please make sure to shutdown Messenger if it is running.

The first step is to go to the bottom left-hand corner of your screen while on the desktop and click on the Start button. When the menu pops up then you can click on the Run button. A little white box pops up and all you have to do is copy and paste the following text into the white box, do not alter the text in any way.

RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\inf\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove

After pasting the above text into the white box, a window will pop up displaying a progress bar showing you that it is deleting Messenger. After that finishes, click on Start and then Run one more time. Type into the box regedit and press the enter key. This will bring up the registry editor, never fool around with this tool unless you know exactly what you are doing, making a mistake here could mess up your computer so bad that you will have to restore it to fix it. If you have never used the editor before, it is real easy to work with. It is situated like a directory tree, with folders and sub-folders until you eventually get to a folder that has information and values in it. You are only going to add one item so what you need to do is navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express

Once you are in the Outlook Express folder you will see some things in the right window pane. What you do is right-click in the right window pane and select New then select Dword Value. It will highlight the entry so you can type in a name for it, you can just put in Stop Messenger or something like that, it doesn't matter what you put actually. After you are done naming it you can then double-click the entry you just created and it will bring up a box that you can add Value Data in, in that box type the number 2 and then click on Ok. Then you are done! Close out the Registry Editor and you are all set. No more annoying Windows Messenger.