Sorry, but that is an entirely different program. Windows Messenger is a program in XP that is used by administrators over large networks to send/receive messages on the network. That problem has been all but eliminated. It used to be enabled by default. When it became exploited by pop-up jerks MS now disables it by default.
The "messenger" service being discussed in this article is for "Windows Live Messenger Service" which is the old MSN Messenger.
All I know is when I loaded XP Professional on a system, the Windows Messenger icons, popup reminder to sign up, etc from Microsoft still appear on the screen and need to be removed for sanity. I don't really care what the police and Microsoft do.