Vincent Chu Tinkerer | Leader | Innovator

Product & Engineering leader in SaaS.
Passionate with technology. Worked at Electronic Arts and Apple before venturing into the startup world.

Chronicle of Killing MSN Advertisements
(MSN ver. 7)

-Last updated: May 10th, 2006

The following is an account of killing MSN ads in version 7. Download MSNAdBlock and keep the application running at the same time as your MSN would prevent MSN from fetching the ads. Refer to another chronicle detailing the killing of Ads in MSN ver.8 (a.k.a. Windows Live Messenger), and an updated MSNAdBlock.

If you are using an older version of MSN, you can probably avoid seeing the advertisement at the bottom of the contact list by doing the following:

Open %userprofile%\local settings\temp\link.txt with notepad, clear the contents of the file, and make the file read-only.

But....

One day, things have changed... and the stupid ads came back !

What the deuce? Lavalife? This is such an insult!

MUST ERADICATE ADVERTISEMENTS. [Instrumental music]

I spent the entire afternoon trying to get rid of the ad, and I noticed it uses IE ActiveX components to get and display the ad. But MSN has gotten smarter - it won't let you connect to MSN if you don't have Internet Explorer enabled (with the right settings) for it to display the ads. Score 1 for MSN.

Evil will not prevail

After hours of endeavor, I've finally come up with my own app to kill the ad! Die ad dieeE! The .exe file is what you really need, and you should have the other support DLL files on your computer already. If you don't, copy the DLL files to %windir%\system32\. FYI - those are the Visual C++ runtime, which in my opinion, *should* be distributed along with Windows anyway.

When the app is running, it would block all attempts for the MSN to fetch the ad! You may want to put the .exe into the startup folder in your start menu.

Life is good again =). If you're like me, who can't even stand seeing the MSN banner, you can get rid of that even using Visual Studio. This is for advanced users, and those with visual studio:

1. In Visual Studio, open up C:\Program Files\MSN Messenger\msnmsgr.exe as a resource.
2. Select GIF as shown in screenshot, and click delete.
3. Save the .exe file.

 

Yay, complete banner removal. Now life is even better ! Score 1 for Vincent.

P.S. I just found out recently that I can also get rid of the tabs on the left within MSN Messenger:

-Check "This is a shared computer so don't display my tabs" from Tools | Options | General Tab.

Now life is even better than ever ! Score another 1 for Vincent.

Download File Download MSN Ads Block for version 7