About the author
Since starting work at the new company, I have had to install Windows Live Messenger, so as to communicate with my colleagues.
One of the silliness of Windows Live Messenger is the advertisement window / pane that keeps showing distracting advertisements... And... off I go to find out the name of the window so that I can hide it.
Using Winspector, I eventually found that the class name of the window is MacromediaFlashPlayerActiveX. And beside it, is the window caption that shows "http://rad.msn.com"... So, I fired up Turbo Delphi (which I had installed on my work laptop)... and started to think about writing an app to automatically hide that irritating advertisement window.
Then I thought of a simpler solution... Pointing rad.msn.com to a site that doesn't respond.. And so, I edited the hosts file and now... no more distracting advertisements! :o)
I always use a patch by http://www.mess.be called called Mess Patch. It has more options than just removing the ad, so I have my own little Windows Live Messenger Light.