Is there a way to stop MSN from automatically removing the participants of a multi-party conversation? I often have large convos happening, and if nobody types anything for as little as 2-3 minutes it removes everyone. This is frustrating, because our groups are often focusing on two or more separate windows, but we have a purpose for the large group MSN convo. Any ideas?

It most likely removes them when the switchboard connection is ended due to inactivity. This is done by "pinging" other through the servers and there is probably no way to stop it.