Over at The Inquirer, Paul Hales has posted a rant about MSN Messenger. It seems that MSN Messenger does not want to be uninstalled!

After reading the article, it becomes obvious that in an effort to rid himself of MSN Messenger, Paul uninstalled it, but Windows Messenger remained installed and continued to start everytime Windows loaded. After rebooting, Paul was greeted by Windows Messenger yet again; This led Paul to conclude that MSN Messenger had not been uninstalled at all.

Paul's story is not uncommon, a lot of people often mistake MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger as the same thing. The fact is: they are two completely separate applications distributed by Microsoft, which look very similar to each other and are both used to connect the .NET Messenger service. Windows Messenger is a part of Windows XP and can not be uninstalled all that easily (it does not appear in Add/Remove programs either).

The upcoming re-branding of MSN Messenger to Windows Live Messenger is probably not going to help this situation either.

The situation is also not helped by the fact that Paul's son and daughter have saved their passwords in the computer which signs them into Messenger when Windows loads. The best course of action in this case would probably have been exiting both MSN and Windows Messenger and then disabling them from starting automatically with Windows.

FYI: MSN Messenger is usually installed in C:\Program Files\MSN Messenger\ while Windows Messenger resides in C:\Program Files\Messenger\

Note: Uninstalling Windows Messenger by simply deleting the 'Messenger' folder is not really a good idea.