Ok, I've got the 'puter almost back to normal

Not sure if that's good or bad- I've had a comment about Macs. Anyway, I think I'm back. The thing is running about as fast as one could expect on a 26k connection. The annoying thing is that I just CAN'T turn off messenger. XP needs messenger to run (that's the warning I get, anyway). I tried taking it out of the boot menue, but still get old contacts poping up. WTF????? I had it disabled before, why won't it work this time?