Uninstall and remove MSN messenger

It's not that dif­fi­cult to remove the pesky lit­tle pile-on of a soft­ware: MSN Messenger!

Let us keep it sim­ple. First, make sure you have exited MSN mes­sen­ger and unsin­stalled any MSN Mes­sen­ger related entry from Con­trol Panel (START –> CONTROL PANEL –> ADD OR REMOVE PROGRAMS).

Then, START –> RUN the fol­low­ing command:

Done. That should remove it. If it doesn't, check some more round-about and cum­ber­some ways from Microsoft that involve the Win­dows registry.

[Thanks to user "Jojje" below, com­ment #61] How to delete all the email addresses (.Net pass­port accounts) stored in MSN mes­sen­ger login

. This can be very sim­ply achieved by doing the following:

(1) In Start –> Run, enter:

(2) In the "Advanced Tab" look for "Man­age Pass­words", which takes care of all the .Net pass­port pass­words on your machine. You can also change the set­ting to not save any from this point on. Read this use­ful com­ment below (August 2005) for a solu­tion that also works.

To dis­able the stor­age of these pass­words alto­gether, fol­low the handy instruc­tions here: WinGuides instruc­tions.

[Thanks to Jes­sica below, com­ment #185] If you're get­ting the pesky "Sign­ing into MSN mes­sen­ger failed because the ser­vice is tem­porar­ily unavail­able. Please try again later 800b0001" error, then fol­low these steps:

Open start menu and click RUN. Then indi­vid­u­ally type in the codes below and press Enter:

After exe­cut­ing these com­mands one by one, it should work.

This is usu­ally because of a fire­wall pre­vent­ing your MSN from con­nect­ing to the Inter­net, even before sign-on process begins. Make sure your fire­wall (Zone Alarm, Nor­ton anti-virus pack­age, etc) are allow­ing MSN Messenger.