Dynamic skinning is the ability to apply a skin without restarting Messenger.
It was said this would be one of the new features of Messenger Plus! 5. However, due to some problems this feature was postponed.
This is of course a bit of bad news for the skinning developers, especially seeing in the light of the
current skinning contest.
However, Yuna did made some progress in regards to dynamic skinning and has provided a registry key to enable it.
Though,
it only works on Windows Live Messenger 2009, and it should be used at your own risk.
See (advanced) registry settings > DynamicSkin
quote:
DynamicSkin
type: Boolean DWORD, 0 (default) or 1
If true (1), Messenger Plus! enables the dynamic skin feature in Messenger 2009 and you can change your skins without restarting messenger (only available in Messenger 2009 yet). Set to false (0) to disable the dynamic skin feature if Messenger ends prematurely.
PS: This registry key is not brand new since today though. However, I've noticed that nobody ever talked about it, so I suspected this wasn't very well know... Hence this post.