Pop ups on XP
 

I just got XP pro and there are these weird pop ups that come from the messenger service, does anyone know how to turn these off?

No, but as a fun fact, i learned how you get adware from the internet without downloading anything :O

SHARE :o

1.Click Start->Settings ->Control Panel
2.Click Administrative Tools
3.Click Services
4.Double click Services Scroll
5.Scroll down and highlight "Messenger"
6.Right-click the highlighted line and choose Properties.
7.Click the STOP button.
8.Select Disable or Manual in the Startup Type scroll bar
9.Click OK

Hope this is what you're looking for.

thanks

Most of your unexplained adware comes from the "Safe for Scripting" bug in ActiveX controls. By simply setting a different flag in one's activeX controls in the code where it would be executed by the user, the authenticode signature can be bypassed entirely. Since Authenticode says "yeah, that's okay", the code gets executed without IE even giving a warning. Thanks to Scriptlet.typelib and Eyedog.OCX being flagged this way on the webpage, they will begin to run on the user's machine. Scriptlet has access to read/write, and create files on the target machine, and the Eyedog has the ability to query the registry and gather machine characteristics,so the programmer just gives them a small program to run quietly in the background. Viola, adware.

does that work on sp2?

Most likely, since ActiveX is still supported in many places and the problem still continues. There are also ways to spoof the certficate and fake out Authenticode without doing it this particular way. The best way to prevent it is dodge ActiveX enabled pages or set IE to prompt you before executing any ActiveX scripts. I believe there is a similar bug with SSL scripting, but it allows only reading of the user's disks.