Have two MSN "men" on my taskbar

[oceanauk]

I seem to have two msn men on my taskbar - one is windows messenger and one is msn messenger.  Are they two different programs or are they the same thing under a different name?  I would like to remove one if it's conflicting with the other.  Any ideas?  Thanks

[mikeyp]

Yes, they're two different programs. One (msn) you download, the other comes with windows. You want to keep msn, but windows messenger ****** me off because you can't seem to shut it down. It'll just reappear later. You can permanently get rid of it though, check here. Don't worry, the vbs script is quite safe. Although I wouldn't recommend running any old vbs file you find.

[oceanauk]

That's great - thank you so much!  Glad I wasn't being stupid!!! LOL!!

[David H]

I was amazed myself when my brand new computer was born with this problem. Every time it booted up it would flick between the two and say I was signed in on a different computer. One is Windows messenger and the other was the almost identical MSN version I loaded from my old computer. Whatever I did couldn't remove the Windows version, the only way I lost it was when my computer crashed and the HDD was wiped.

Miraculously when I had the new one loaded it didn't have the annoying Windows messenger, but I wouldn't recommend such a drastic solution. Previously I'd been given removal methods by software engineers to no effect.