A few people have reported the same problem to me recently – several times a day, Internet Explorer will pop up a new window with a link to :

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-messenger?os=other

Not only is this annoying if you haven’t updated to 2011 yet, but it also seems to be popping up for people who have already installed Messenger 2011!

There are a number of people reporting the same problem over at the Microsoft forums:

http://www.windowslivehelp.com/thread.aspx?threadid=25d1cde4-2dea-4445-85ea-1441af0487b5&page=2

http://windowslivehelp.com/thread.aspx?threadid=08eeb13a-e1c7-4f8e-896b-cb2826386131&page=2

 

 

Solution/Workaround

One of the suggested solutions is the following:

  • Go to the Control Panel
  • double-click on Internet Options
  • Select the Security tab and click on Restricted sites
  • click on the Sites button below and add rad.msn.com to the zone.

I doubt this will help if IE isn’t your default browser however, so an alternative solution is to add the following to your hosts file

(c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts)

127.0.0.1    rad.msn.com