It's actually very simple. Live Messenger get's all it's ad information from a host called rad.msn.com (remote advertisment!?) and since it's possible to tell Windows to not lookup a host through the host file, one can quickly get rid of the ads in Messenger.
You need administrative privligaes for this, and if you are running Vista and have UAC enabled you need to make sure you launch both Notepad.exe and Cmd.exe with elevation (Shift right-click them in the start-menu and choose run as administrator).
- First, find you host file, Microsoft Windows (NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista) is located in %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc by default (e.g C:\Windows\system32...)
- Second, open Notepad.exe as administrator (and with elevation if you use Vista and UAC) choose File > Open... and navigate to the host file (make sure you show all files) and open it. It's called "hosts" without a file extension.
- Now add the following new line at the end of the file: "0.0.0.0 rad.msn.com". Save the file and close Notepad.
Enjoy your Ad free Windows Live Messenger.
