How to remove ads from Live Messenger

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.

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.