Any suggestions on which direction I should go. I feel that both will work for what I need it for but does anyone have experience with realpopup? I have used winchat a million times.

Also is realpopup compatible with Vista & Win 7?

As far as I know, was winchat dropped with windows xp sp-2 ?

Realpopup is kind of sweet little app with a very small footprint.
It is great for basic chat on a lan; you cannot send files with it though (which is not such a bad thing since you always can paste the link.. )
It does work well in a mix of Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows XP SP3 pc's (I don't have a Vista PC so I cannot guarantee it works but I wouldn't know why not :)
The official site is not available since some time, don't ask me why though. The latest build is (again: as far as I know) v2.6.167 which you can find easily on internet for free.

Don't expect miracles by it, but for basic messaging on your lan, it does what it says quite perfectly.

I use winchat with XP SP2 PC'sat work, it does not work with SP3 but for my home LAN I decided to use RealPop which works nice. It is simple and easy.

Thanks for the reply!

Try LAN messenger.

Thanks for the reply but I use RealPop and it works fine!

Lan Messenger is nice, I actually did try it. But its no freeware - and for that it was not suitable for my (basic) requirements with a good, stabil freeware as Realpopup available.