Just a side note, if you're willing to reformat your PC, you can use nLite to *safely* remove Windows Messenger from your system before you install.
At least I think it's safe, I've been running like this for almost 2 months now
Note: Doing that will mean that some old Messenger Plus 3 plugins that rely on the WM API will cease to function, but I've not run in to any yet.
Maybe we should split Cookie's post and sticky it?