MSN has delayed by a week the start of its beta for its MSN Messenger 7 instant-messaging (IM) client until some time next week.

MSN officials had said the company planned to commence the MSN Messenger 7 beta this week in six test markets: the U.S., U.K., France, Spain, Korea and the Netherlands. But some testers who got their hands on leaked copies of the beta discovered potential security exploits based on the "Winks" capability.

Winks are animations that help grab other IM users' attention. Winks originally debuted as part of a beta of threedegrees, an IM product catering to the teen — or as Microsoft has characterized it, the "NetGen" — market.

Posters on the NeoWin Windows enthusiast site began reporting problems with MSN Messenger 7's Winks last week.

"Currently it's easy for hackers to exploit the code of winks to display any flash movies on a users computer for any amount of time," according to NeoWin.

"MSN plans to make some adjustments to the feature set of the limited beta and will no longer be testing 'winks' as part of this initial limited beta," said an MSN spokeswoman. "People using early/unauthorized versions of the beta that include winks will be notified that they need to uninstall the beta and reinstall the latest public version of MSN Messenger 6.2 if they want to continue service.

The spokeswoman added that it wasn't the Winks that Microsoft included in the MSN Messenger code, based on Flash, that were the problem. It was "rogue" Winks that could be used to create breaches.

"While the winks we originally planned to ship with the limited beta had no known issues, we are conscious of the need to help protect beta testers from "rogue" winks. We are committed to shipping a secure product and therefore will not release winks to our beta testers or the broader public until we are comfortable that any potential issues have been addressed," she said.

MSN officials said last week that the company is planning a broader MSN Messenger 7 beta to go out later this year. The target date for the final is early 2005, company officials said.

MSN launched MSN Messenger 6.2 in April. Concurrent with that release, MSN added a number of new subscription games to its IM offering.