BB & Pop-Up Spam

Synkronite

Im not sure if this is affecting anyone, as it doesnt seem to have been raised here.. however it has affected me, and a friend of mine, we both got IOL BB early July.. Both have USB modems hooked up to Win XP (Mistake I know, but Im getting a router soon) Anyhow, Ive noticed the quantity of Messenger Alert Pop-up spam has increased 10-fold.. As in Im averaging atleast one every hour now -- this was never the case with IOL No Limits. Although Im moving to a modem/router solution soon, my friend will continue using WinXP -- was just wondering if anyone else is having the same problems, and could it have anything to do with our Esat DSL ips?

Thanks.

Hobbes

1. Get a firewall.


Otherwise.

As some of you may know Ive been having problems with spam windows appearing while playing neocron. The ad (selling a method to make easy money) would appear causing neocron to minimize. After closing the ad window and enlarging neocron from the task bar it would always display "fatal runtime error" and shutdown. This has happened several times at least and only while playing neocron. How were annoying spam windows being sent to me while I was in game? The last incident occured minutes ago but this time the ad was a little different. In the text I noticed a line containing "webpopup has sent you this message..." so I searched for webpopup using yahoo. Webpopup is actually a program others can use to send you ads through an obscure open connection feature in xp. This connection is open by default and somehow uses windows messenger...even when messenger is shutdown. The search listed many sites but I only clicked on one as it had the info I needed. The site is (exactly as I saw it in the address bar): http://www.monroeworld.com/pchelp/xptweaks.php Once there scroll down to number 16. There you will find the quick, easy steps to stop and disable this connection which I have copied and typed below:

a. Right click on MY COMPUTER
b. Select MANAGE
c. Select SERVICES AND APPLICATIONS
d. Double click SERVICES
e. Find MESSENGER service (alphabetical order)
f. Right click MESSENGER and select PROPERTIES
g. Hit STOP
h. Select DISABLED from START TYPE menu
i. Hit OK

I was shocked to discover it had always been on. Maybe you will never find yourself in the situation I was in but at least you have the knowledge to turn this feature off if you want to. I, for one wouldn't want a backdoor open for others to take advantage of. There are other goodies on that page. I hope this info is useful.


Last edited by Atomik on 2002-11-23 at 07:01

jimhenson

The new beta Google toolbar has a really excellent non-intrusive pop-up blocker. I've run it for a few weeks now and its great.

http://toolbar.google.com/index-beta.php

Synkronite

Thanks guys
Worked!

suppafly

hobbes i was just wondering, does turning off that thing disble MSN messenger completely or does it just close that hole when yur not using it?

SuprSi

It just affects Windows system messages, not MSN Messenger or any other instant messaging program