I am so with you on this. I felt the same and kept ignoring the invite to
upgrade because I didnt' want to mess up a good thing. Being forced to I
did!!! Nothing worked when I finished installing the upgrade. It took a full
week before I could even make contact with someone. This is what worked for
me and I don't know if yours is set up the same but inside my hotmail email
window in the top right corner it has "messenger" listed and when I sign in
here it seems to work for me. But when I sign in on my old shortcut it says I
have no contacts and I am off line. Grrrrrrrrrrr very frustrating. Why can't
microsoft just have a quick chat window to answer such easy questions and
take the frustration out of all this BS!!!!! Now if someone can help me find
out how to turn on my "messenger alert" and by this I mean when I get an
answer back after minimizing the chat window an orange light with thier name
would blink at the bottom of the screen. Not anymore!!! Some people have told
me that thier's beep when they someone sends them a message.

"Anubis" wrote:

I am now thoroughly ticked off at this Instant Messaging service and
Microsoft in general. I never wanted to upgrade the new IM system and yet I
was forced to by MSN in order to comply or no IM. Now afer downloading the
upgrade, the damn thing won't work and furthermore MSN won't allow you to
download the previous version, which worked just fine. In my frustration I
try to contact Microsoft for help, sure they will help me, for an exorbitant
amount of money. I didn't break it so why the hell should I have to pay to
fix it. You talk about having people by the short and curlys...this is
ridiculous! I don't use the IM to chit chat to buddies, this is an important
part of keeping immediate contact with remote work colleagues. I'm ****ed!!!

Anubis