Me and a few other friends decided to send tons of smilies just for fun to someone. Messenger Plus adds a function that allows us to send more characters when Plus is installed. When sending lots of smilies, the receiver's computer and MSN will get a huge lag.

Well, anyways, we did that to many people. They usually had to wait a few minutes, and then everything worked normally. But one person logged off while we did it, and when she logs on, Messenger receives all the smilies. But it still doesn't work after she waits a few minutes.

So basically, the messages she receives when she logs on are messages we sent while she was logged off. When she logs on, she gets all the messages, and WLM won't start correctly because it's receiving all those messages, and it hangs up and won't start correctly. As this was originally just intented to be funny, it really bugs me because she can't use her ID anymore, except for Windows Messenger.

It doesn't work on other computers with either. I've tried disabling smilies before she logs on, but it still doesn't work. So the only thing I can think of now is to export her contact list, create a new account, and then start using that account instead. But she doesn't want to change her email adress. Any suggestions?

I'm not sure what the registry location for this entry is, however this should fix the problem:

Bring up the options menu (Tools -> Options in the contact list). Click the Messages tab. Under the "Offline Instant Message Settings" grouping, choose "Show a link..."

This will prevent the offline messages from showing up when she signs in, instead a small toast will pop up alerting her she has the messages.

I'm guessing if she clicks it the program will crash again...

But WLM stops working when she logs on, and the option isn't available when she's logged off.

Ok, I found the registry entry, but you're going to have to use regedit to do this manually I'm afraid.

Navigate to:

HKCurrentUser\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger\PerPassportSettings

There should be only a single entry... if there's more than one, you'll need to find the correct one... there's a program lying about which will generate the correct value for you, I don't know where it is offhand...

Anyway, click on the correct folder and find the
"ConsolidateOIMs" key. Give it the value 01 00 00 00. (If it doesn't exist it's type REG_BINARY).