All those extra "features" like Advertising, what's new, etc. are really annoying and I recently reach my limit of tolerance and found that removing these were actually quite easy.
The program is called A-patch for Windows Live Messenger and it modifies the files of you Windows Live installation to remove some of the annoying things. You can choose which components you want to remove and it backs up the original files for you as well.
Visit for more information and download A-patch
http://apatch.org/