Michael, you're a wizz...thanks, was too easy, tho i would never have found that myself

, i have another issue now. On my main XP home screen, where u choose your name/icon thing to log on to windows....it keeps telling me 'you have 13 unread messages'. When i hover my cursor over that, it tells me its for the hotmail.com account that i just deleted from my messenger log on (as instructed by you). This was a friends log on, she used my MSN messenger once and her log on name stayed there, now that i managed to get rid of that, how can i get rid of her unread hotmail messages, which are appearing under my Windows log on? I have no idea why it has associated me with her hotmail address. Does that make sense? Anyway, any suggestions appreciated, maybe the answer is somewhere in the <control userpasswords2> thing as well? thanks.