Good Luck....

I can't give you any more advice about setting things straight but before other newbies (like myself) get frightened away from disabling messenger...

I did it and everything is working fine... I didn't do it through the services.msc ....

I used utilities from http://grc.com/default.htm , it makes it easy for us newbies to disable a few things and learn a bit about security

I didn't disable RPC... but I did disable DCOM ...