"Chance Hopkins" said:
just a guess, but shut of the service called "Messenger" (it's not related
to the chat program with the similar name)
Bzzt. Wrong guess. That just hides the problem.
"What's the problem?" you ask.
The problem would appear to be that people are sending you adverts, right?
No, that's just part of the problem.
I have an annoying rattle in the engine of my car. Should I turn up the
radio?
That will hide the problem - I will no longer hear the rattle, and it will
no longer annoy me. But when my car breaks down, nobody will offer me
sympathy, because I chose to ignore something that I could have known was
going to lead to a fault.
Okay, so we're all somewhat aware that when an engine changes its noise,
that may mean trouble. What we're clearly not all aware of is that these
messages are coming in as unwanted packets of network-borne data. There are
other unwanted packets, that don't announce themselves on your screen, that
travel on the same network ports, and that can be destructive to your
system.
Stopping the Messenger Service does nothing at all to block those packets.
Enabling a firewall _does_ stop those packets. Leaving the Messenger
Service enabled has the wonderful side-effect that it re-assures you that
your firewall is still functioning (because if it wasn't, you'd be seeing
the spam again!)
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/using/howto/communicate/stopspam.asp
is a clear article on how to enable the firewall. [It doesn't work for AOL
users, so AOL users will have to contact AOL technical support, because AOL
made the decision to disallow the firewall from working.]
Alun.
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[Please don't email posters, if a Usenet response is appropriate.]
