Are you tired of seeing MSN Messenger pop up on your Windows XP system? As usual, in an effort to continue its course towards domination of everything, Microsoft has made it difficult to remove. But it is possible! The following method works in Windows XP Professional, but has not been tested on a system with SP1 installed. FYI, I’ve seen scripts that are similar to this, but fail miserably, automatically deleting other much-needed components! Better to do this slow and manually! As always, I am not responsible for the use or the misuse of this information; use at your own risk.

1. Exit MSN Messenger by right-clicking the MSN icon in the notification area, and selecting Exit.
2. Add the following registry entries, both with a DWORD value of 1:
   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftMessengerClientPreventRun
   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftMessengerClientPreventAutoRun
3. Open a command prompt by clicking Start/Run, then typing “command” and clicking OK.
4. Uninstall MSN Messenger by typing

   rundll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %systemRoot%INFmsmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove

5. Uninstall the leftover installation information file by typing

   rundll32 setupapi,InstallHinfSection BLC.Remove 128 %systemRoot%INFmsmsgs.inf

6. Allow MSN Messenger to be displayed in the Add/Remove Windows Components dialog in the future (if it pops up again!) by typing notepad.exe %systemRoot%INFsysoc.inf and deleting the word “hide” from the line that starts with “msmsgs=”. It MAY be possible to skip to this step directly and perform the uninstallation directly from the Add/Remove Windows Components dialog, but that method MAY leave unwanted components and has not been thoroughly tested.
7. Cross your fingers and reboot! You will probably get a message asking you to confirm the removal of some leftover files. Click OK.

The Problem

I decided to give Microsoft one more chance to have one of its (non)operating systems on my primary home computer. After reformatting my drive and beginning installing Windows XP from a freshly opened WinXP CD that I received direct from Dell, the following message appeared: “Manifest Parse error: Invalid at top level of document”. The installation failed and stopped because it could not correctly parse the CONTROLS.MAN file.

There are many theories as to what causes the error. Many folks prefer to keep their original disks in close-to-pristine condition and install from CD copies, yet rumors abound that as many as 60-70% of copies experience this error during installation. On the other hand, hundreds of people have gotten the error while installing from fresh-out-of-the-shrink-wrap, boxed versions of Windows XP. I’ve heard everything from “it’s a copy protection scheme” to “it locks you out after three installations”. None of the theories seem to be accurate.

I must be a glutton for punishment, because rather than scrapping the OS completely, I decided to push all the theories aside and figure out how to get around the problem. Old habits — like most computers running Microsoft operating systems — die hard.

The Solution

The /i386/asms/6000/msft/windows/common/controls/controls.man file on the CD is corrupt. Microsoft’s installation program doesn’t allow you to select an alternate source location for the file. It doesn’t even allow you full command prompt access. And the Recovery Program is useless, as it doesn’t even allow you to copy directories or copy using wildcards!

Copy your entire CD to your harddrive, use my version of the CONTROLS.MAN file (don’t forget to change the file extension), and burn another CD. In theory, you could copy the entire i386 directory to your harddrive, replace the damaged file, and then run \i386\winnt.exe to install, but if you really want a reliable and stable system, it is not wise to install the XP operating system over an existing, older OS. Burning a CD is the best viable option for a fresh, clean install.

Whether the new OS works well enough to dissuade me from breaking down and purchasing an iMac remains to be seen.

Author’s Note: This obsolete article has been retained for posterity.

The technique mentioned below applied only to Internet Explorer 5.5 and earlier. As of 2012 (ten years after this article was originally written), IE5.x market share has fallen well below 0.01% of all browser clients, and there is no justification to implement solutions for such ancient Web technology. Nowadays, a well-crafted style sheet solves the problem easily — and still allows for well-formed code, so there is no more dilemna.

If you’re a real web designer or developer, you’ve undoubtedly come across one or two problems that have incessantly plagued you — no matter what you did you just couldn’t make it turn out right in the browser.

Here’s one such example that I know has tortured quite a few developers. You’re working on a form such as a standalone select box or text input box, you want it to be very tightly integrated with some particular part of your design, and no matter what you do, either it keeps pushing down HTML elements underneath it or you can’t get it to vertically center within that part of your web page. There’s just this dåmn gap that won’t go away!

It’s actually pretty simple, but you literally have to think outside the box. Nowadays, writing well-formed code (code that has all open and close tags in the proper order) is a must. You can’t work with XML without being well formed, and it’s a fundamental requirement of the XHTML standards. Unfortunately, in this case, the real world (along with the world’s leading browser) forces you to occasionally create code that is not well formed in order to achieve the desired result. It goes against everything you’ve been taught, but put your HTML tags in the following order:

<td><form></td></form>

Your closing FORM tag actually ends up outside the table cell.

Naturally, this is an IE-only issue. Thanks again, Microsoft, for making all developers lives so much easier by introducing these quirks into your browser, so that we developers and designers have to work that much harder to obtain our stylistic goals!