Hopefully I don’t bore you too much with Windows Live Messenger 2011 tips but I just recently discovered this. Whenever I finished installing Windows Live Messenger, the first thing I would do is to remove the advertisement that is embedded to the interface. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is consistently ranked among the world’s wealthiest people and removing an ad or two from WLM won’t hurt their wallet at all. Anyway, one of a very good tool that I recommend to remove ads from Windows Live Messenger 2011 is A-Patch. A-Patch has been around since MSN Messenger 6 and kept up to date until today. What I like about A-Patch is its free, portable (don’t require installation), clean (no installation of toolbar or any spyware), easy to use and it works.

There are two Remove Advertisement checkboxes on A-Patch and the difference is the first one removes the advertisement banner from the bottom of the contact list, and the second one is to remove the text advertisement from the bottom of your message window. Everything should look much cleaner after removing the ads from Windows Live Messenger 2011 but I noticed that the chat / conversation window still has a small advertisement at the bottom.

A-Patch doesn’t seem to remove that advertisement and every time I had to click on the X button to close the ad. Fortunately it is possible to hide the ad at the Windows Live Messenger 2011 chat window from the Options.


From Windows Live Messenger 2011, press Alt+T which will show the Tools menubar. Select Options. Click on Messages at the left navigation bar, uncheck “Show expanded footer in conversation windows” and click the OK button.

You will notice that the ads are no longer shown at the bottom of the conversation window. Now Windows Live Messenger 2011 is perfectly clean without advertisement even while chatting. Took me a while to discover what is that “expanded footer” option for because the description is not very clear and doesn’t say anything about advertisement.