I’ve always been annoyed that Outlook Express 6 is tied to Windows Messenger. In the default configuration, when you start OE6, it starts the Windows Messenger application. From my perspective, if I want Windows Messenger to run, I’ll start it.<\/p>\n
In Windows XP Pro, there is a group policy you can set to keep Windows Messenger from running at all. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that setting this policy introduces a huge lag when you start up Outlook Express. It seems that OE will pause for 30 seconds to a minute when it is starting up while it tries to start up Windows Messenger. Of course, since that policy is set to keep Windows Messenger from starting, it will eventually decide it can’t start it up and then finish starting up Outlook Express.<\/p>\n
After noticing that, I thought I would solve my problem by simply uninstalling Windows Messenger. It turns out that you CAN’T uninstall Windows Messenger from Windows XP. The tools that Microsoft gives you only allow you to hide it, but not uninstall it. That wasn’t going to work either.<\/p>\n
Finally, after doing a little searching on the net, I found my answer. If you change the name of the executable file for Windows Messenger to something else, Outlook Express will decide right away that it can’t start it. You now get the best of both worlds. Outlook Express starts up quickly AND Windows Messenger doesn’t start. <\/p>\n
The executable file for Windows Messenger is found in C:\\Program Files\\Messenger\\<\/p>\n
–Pete<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve always been annoyed that Outlook Express 6 is tied to Windows Messenger. In the default configuration, when you start OE6, it starts the Windows Messenger application. From my perspective, if I want Windows Messenger to run, I’ll start it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}