How to remove ads from Live Messenger

Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 10:57 am by Nicholas Mead

Free, Internet, Mac, Software, Tips, Web, Windows

There’s many things that annoy me about Windows Live Messenger but nothing more so than the advertisements that scroll the bottom bar. Invariably, they’re of no interest to me whatsoever, they make the program more bloated and if you click on them accidentally, you end up diverting your browser where you don’t want to.

There’s no way of deactivating this within Live Messenger itself so the only thing for it is to use Live Advert Remover (formerly known as MSN Advert Removal) which blocks all advertisement banners from being displayed in Live Messenger. It works with all versions of Live and MSN Messengers and you need to run it only once to “patch” your system.

Live Messenger Advertisement

In fact, Live Advert Remover doesn’t do anything special - it just modifies a script in your host file that you could do yourself but it’s a little bit tricky and much easier to use this program. Note that Live Advert Remover does not make the default Live Messenger banner disappear - the banner will remain intact, but it is never replaced by a commercial advertisement. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with Messenger Plus! either.

Reader comments

Eric Gurhaimer

Posted at 11:09 pm on Oct 27th

This a short and quick how-to on removing those annoying ads at the bottom of Live Messenger main window. Lets get started..

Go here: http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/
Download Resource Hacker ver. 3.4.0 (Zip File 541kb).
After unzipping the contents open ResHacker.exe.
Open in Resource Hacker (File -> Open…) msgsres.dll located in (in most cases): C:\Program Files\MSN Messenger
Click on View -> Find Text… on the menu bar.
On the “Find what:” field put in:
<Constrainer layoutpos=top ID=Atom(SSConstrainer) Layout=FillLayout()
Change layoutpos value from top to none.
The line should now look like:
Save)
Open Messenger. Enjoy your now ad-less version of Live Messenger!