MSN Messenger wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t feel the need to ingrain itself in every other Microsoft communications program, i.e. Outlook and Outlook Express. Scratch that - It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t require hacking the registry and unknown system config files to remove or even to just not start up when Outlook Express starts up. Alas, one must set this registry key if one does not want MSN Messenger to start when Outlook Express starts:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\Hide Messenger=2 (REG_DWORD)

I didn’t want it to not run at all, so I didn’t set some other registry keys that would prevent that or uninstall it completely. I just didn’t want it to run when Outlook Express ran…imagine that!