Afternoon turbomcp, If your after stopping it from loading, you can do no worse than doing the below, this will actually UN-INSTALL it completely. Make sure your Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Messenger and other programs are closed before doing this. 1) Click on Start, Run 2) Type the following (or cut and paste it) into the Run line RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove 3) Click on OK More ways of doing it can be found here => http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_messenger.htm This includes, uninstalling, disabling service, stopping from autloading at startup and a few other Hope that helps