Messenger Service Popups

The Messenger Service will give you popups even with a firewall (ZoneAlarm). I assume at some point a site was accessed that d/l something through IE (which has rights).

It wasn't my computer so I've never had time to research it enough to locate the file or cause.

 

regarding these "services", microsoft takes the approach that everything should always be enabled on their operating systems. i would imagine most of it could be turned off for the average user.

 

If you are getting popups, your firewall software sucks. It only needs to block incoming data streams that are not responses to sessions initiated by your computer. Or just block the messenger ports altogether - ports 135 and 1026.

 

MSFT takes the approach that a firewall is needed for anyone connected to the internet. Simply enabling the XP personal firewall would prevent every spam/hacker attack that has come out in the last few years (other than the e-mail stuff, but that's just user-ed - don't click on random executables).

In Windows 2003 and in announcements about future versions of Windows, MSFT has already taken the approach that services will be disabled by default. In fact, it is likely (announced today) that future versions of Windows will have all security patch management enabled by default - if you run Windows .Next and you're on a broadband connection, you'll ALWAYS be current with security patches...