Having gotten sick of the obnoxious Flash-based ads in MSN Messenger, as well as the unweildy tabs mechanism, I made an effort several months ago to deprecate Messenger in favor of the Windows port of Gaim. Unfortunately, I found myself turned off by Gaim's incompatibility with MSN's video conferencing (how I see my kid when I'm on the road) and the general "industrial" feel of the GTK+ library Gaim is built on.  On my last trip out of town, I found myself going back to MSN Messenger.

The thing is, the interface still bothers me.  The ads are annoying, as is the clutter from the tabs.  Here's my tips on creating a nice, minimalist MSN Messenger environment.

1. The built-in configuration options are your friend.  At a minimum, turn off the "Show MSN Today on Login" option.  If you're getting sick of your contacts' display pictures, by all means, disable those too.  You'll note the default soccer ball associated with my wife's entry in the screenshot.  I hate that.  Default images annoy me.
   
2. Kill the tabs.  There's an option to do it in the Security section of the options (on Messenger 7.5).  Find the checkbox that says "This is a shared computer so don't display my tabs" and check it.  If you don't have that option, there are alternatives.
   
3. The ads are a piece of cake to kill.  Using ZoneAlarm to block and log all outgoing connections from Messenger, I quickly deduced that the ads were being served from a web service on http://config.messenger.msn.com.  If you're using ZoneAlarm or another software-based program-oriented firewall, just block outbound HTTP from MSN Messenger to that address.  Alternatively, add an entry to your HOSTS file (C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts on Windows XP) that points config.messenger.msn.com back to 127.0.0.1.  That works just as well.