Windows 7 is doing what Vista couldn’t: convincing people to replace Windows XP. The best quote in this ZDNet article: “Windows 7 is the Anti-Vista.”

The Straight Dope experiments with Kahlua cupcakes to determine two questions: How much alcohol is left in each cupcake? (Not much) Can you get drunk? (Not unless you eat so many cupcakes that you’ll be sick anyway.)

Some comics fan art. First, a realistic Darkwing Duck by Mike P. Mitchell. I suspect that if someone other than Disney owned the character, we’d be seeing a “live-action” movie that looked like this. Second, Comics Alliance collects a fantastic series of cover art for Great Comics That Never Happened – team-ups like the Justice League and the Wu-Tang Clan, or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen featuring 1980s icons like Mr. T, Doc Brown and MacGyver, or Hannah Zatanna, torn between the worlds of superheroes and magic, or a race between Superman, the Flash…and the Dukes of Hazzard.

I don’t use Windows Live Messenger. I don’t even have an account on Windows Live Messenger. But every time I logged in to my system, WLM would pop up a window and ask me to log in. Every single time.

There was no obvious way to disable it, and most of the suggestions I found online only applied to earlier versions of Windows.

It doesn’t provide an option to stop it from launching on startup. Or rather, it does, but only if you’ve logged into WLM. Since I didn’t have an account, I couldn’t do that, and I wasn’t about to create one just to turn it off!

It wasn’t in the Start-Up folder.

I didn’t see it in Services, so I couldn’t disable it there.

I tried running System Configuration and disabling it in the Startup tab, but that didn’t work.

I couldn’t even find it in the list of programs to uninstall.

But you know what?

I finally got rid of it! And it was easier than I expected.

It turns out that if you uninstall Windows Live Essentials, you don’t have to remove the whole thing. You can choose which pieces to remove! Just tell it to uninstall, and it’ll bring up a checklist of the pieces that are on the system. Check off Windows Live Messenger, leave the pieces you want to keep, and hit Continue.

Done!