Live Messenger Problems, Fixed.

Several weeks ago I was over at iNNN in Reykjavik, Iceland. While there I made friends with all the developers (seriously cool bunch of guys they are) but was gutted that my MSN/Live Messenger would not receive or send invitations to them. Other than that I have also noticed other strange behaviour with my current contacts.

I tried saving my contacts to an XML file using Contacts->Save.. and creating a brand new account. I didn't get too far down this road because Live Messenger wouldn't let me even sign into the new account. It would just say "Signing in" forever. One of the guys at iNNN too said he recently had the same issue and was forced to set up a new account. At this point I got really depressed and assumed the MSN network itself was in a bad state and even started using Skype (I didn't use Skype for long though!).

Hope came when I signed into another machine that I hadn't used before the invitations came through and all seemed OK. However on my home and office machine, I still couldn't see the new contacts. I tried using Meebo and that worked too. Next I tried re-installing the Live Messenger client, and that had no effect. It was clearly some corrupt database in my profile area or something like that.

I fired up trusty Sysinternals FileMon/RegMon and signed in to see where it was referencing.

On the file system side - I found two profile areas used by Live Messenger.

C:\Documents and Settings\Tim Scarfe\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows Live Contacts\[email address]

C:\Documents and Settings\Tim Scarfe\Contacts\[email address]

My first hunch was to delete the contents of these folders and try signing in again. When I did so it just said "Signing in" forever (as with the new account I created).

After some trial and error I discovered that renaming the registry entry:

HKLM\CU\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger\Policies\contacts.msn.com

Would allow me to sign in!

The strange thing is that I can't find any reference to this key in my Regmon trace but I am quite certain it was responsible for fixing the sign-in problem.

I assume this registry key was also responsible for me not being able to sign in on the new account I created too but I haven't verified that yet.

With that problem fixed, feel free to come and have an IM chat J