Immediately after recovering from the msblast worm, I started getting some popup's that came via instant messenger. I did some research on this, and found that this is the "Windows Messenger" facility, meant for an admin being able to send popup messages on a LAN, etc. These popups were particularly offensive, since they basically said "pay me to turn these ads off". About as tacky as it gets. My question is why didn't turning on XP's firewall (ICF) stop these? I turned this on via the Network Setup Wizard for all my dialup connections, and it is supposed to prevent this sort of popup. Is there some configuration that I can do to block popups via ICF that isn't obvious? I read the Microsoft support site articles and found nothing there specifically addressing configuring ICF to block popups, it just says that it will (but it doesn't). Anyway, I turned off the "Messenger" service by bringing up Windows Messenger and disabling the autostartup. Since then no more popups and it doesn't seem to affect anything else on my system. Yahoo instant messenger still seems to work (my daughter uses it), and all. Thanks. -Roger

Roger, ICF will not block the Messnger popup up's. While ICF does a great job as a firewall you can do very little to configure ports for incoming connections. If you want control over your ports use a hardware or software firewall. KTTD

Kevin, Thanks for the response, guess I'm just a little too hopeful... Have you seen: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5BLN%5D;Q330904 If you start there and look at the referenced articles as well, they say that ICF now blocks this sort of spam (popups from Windows Messenger), or very strongly imply that (*smile*). Again, thanks. -Roger

I'm not sure who wrote the article but I have had to disable messenger service on systems with SP1 that had ICF running in order to prevent them. This is why I love microsoft, they keep me in a job :) KTTD

Well, they don't actually keep me in a job, but they do keep me guessing (*smile*). On the other hand, support and/or testing may be my next job when my current one is moved to India (*sigh*). -Roger

try to use LanTalk XP http://www.lantalk.net