Microsoft Messenger and why it runs an internet explorer…

One day I was playing with AutoIt window finder when I move it to the publicity section of my MSN.
I got amazed when I saw it was an instance of IE (Internet Explorer) running there consuming resources and showing things that I’m not interested in.

I started to search for the properties of that control til I found it was receiving data from “rad.msn.com” (of course it generates tracking cookies… I think it’s because of market study. That’s why your AV (Anti Virus) will report tracking cookies).
Then I said “Well, I’ll kill that process” and I started to figure out things that might be a pain to code. After going any further I analyzed all the possibilites, one of those were the “host” file inside “C:\WINDOWS\System32\Drivers\etc\”. With that file you can map ip addresses to hostnames.

By editing the “host” file with just this:


127.0.0.1    rad.msn.com


… every time anything on your computer tries to connect to “rad.msn.com” it will connect to your own computer which might lead into no data to that little box of MSN.

When that box has no data or it cannot connect to “rad.msn.com” it doesn’t create any instance of Internet Explorer so more resources free.

That box will look like this:

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