Hi there,

I never encountered this problem until this morning, when WLM failed to
launch when I double clicked the shortcut. I've tried
uninstalling/reinstalling, and I've even uninstalled messenger plus live but
the result is the same. Although it doesn't launch, msnmsgr.exe appears in
the windows task manager. After clicking on the shortcut several times, there
would be multiple copies of the msnmsgr.exe in the task manager. When I try
to shut down, I would have to end each of those msnmsgr.exe's individually as
they're all unresponsive.

I'm curious as to how I can fix this problem.

Thanks in advance,

Xedger

If you've uninstalled Messenger Plus! Live and you still see that when you start Windows Live Messenger multiple times there are multiple msnmsgr.exe processes running, then it might mean that something has patched your msnmsgr.exe file and/or corrupted it.

Because one of the very first things Messenger will check and do is checking if there is already a Messenger process running. If so, it will not start another process.

So, make sure you don't have any other addons, tools or patches which can tamper with your Messenger program.

Start by manually removing the entire Messenger directory (to make sure any trace of any 3rd party tool is removed). Redownload Messenger from the official site (important!), and reinstall it...

(In the end, when Messenger runs properly again, you will also need to reinstall or repair Messenger Plus! Live since you've removed the Messenger directory manually and thus removed Plus!'s startup DLL doing that)

I deleted all the folders and did a clean reinstall but it still didn't work.

At first it said that msnmsgr.exe could not be found when I clicked on the new shortcut, but after I repaired it in Add or Remove Programs, I clicked on the shortcut again and the same problem occured: there were multiple copies of msnmsgr.exe in the task manager.

Edit: Fixed, a person told me to reset my router and it worked.

errr... It doesn't make much sense that when you reinstall Messenger, the new shortcut would be corrupted since Messenger would simply be installed in the same directory as before...
And it doesn't make any sense that resetting the router would fix the startup problems. Resetting the router might mix connection problems (like signing in), but not startup problems.

Anyways, glad it is solved...

I had the same problem with launching messenger on all the PCs within the network. The process msnmsgr.exe was running but no UI was displayed. Problem fixed after the router was restarted.