I don’t know about you, but I find the mouse over ad’s on Windows Live Messenger extremely annoying. Every time I accidently move the mouse over the ad, it keeps popping up forcing me to move my mouse all the way to the top to close it.

As you can see on the left, it can get quite annoying and almost made me stop using Windows Live Messenger. To top it off, the ad’s appear OVER other applications if they are on top of (and overlap) Messenger.

While I don’t condone removing advertising from free products, this was one exception I had to make simply to save bandwidth as well as stop me from uninstalling an otherwise excellent application.

In order to remove the ads follow the steps below:

Step 1

Open up Notepad, and select File..Open. In the resulting window, navigate to \Windows\System32\Drivers\etc

Ensure that Files of Type is set to “All Files”

Step 2

Select the file called “hosts” and click on Open. This will open the hosts file and it should look something similar to below:

Step 3

You may have more than one line in the list of IP addresses. Add this line to the list:

127.0.0.1      rad.msn.com

Ensure there is a TAB between the IP Address and the URL.

Step 4

Save the file and close it.

Step 5

Restart Windows Live Messenger and check to ensure that the images are now gone. The ad’s should now be replaced by a blank white space. The space will still be there, but at least, now we no longer have that annoying flash advert that pops up and kills what would be an otherwise love user experience :)

Hope that helps someone out there :)