Messenger Crashes and My Findings

I've been seeing more and more of the msn crashing complaints recently and found myself to be one of the victims. I searched the www for answers but came up with only vague solutions or ideas as to what the cause may be. I had long since given up on finding the cause, which meant never using messenger, until I realised how much I needed it.

Every time I sign into my account, Messenger crashes, giving the old "Sorry for inconvenience... blah blah... send and error report..." message. No one seems to know the answer to this problem. I decided to take up the old sport of troubleshooting once more and here's how I sniped,

Firstly, this problem was not confined to WLM, it worked with previous versions as well, what ever i could get my hands on, but nothing worked. I even tried every Messenger version (8.1BETA, 8, 7.5 etc) with combinations of Plus! versions including not having it there at all. (I had no other Messenger Plugins installed, no skins nor Plus! scripts).
SO IT WASN'T ISOLATED TO THE VERSION

Secondly, I discovered that a very old unused hotmail account worked perfectly.
SO IT WASN'T EXACTLY A PROGRAM ERROR

Thirdly, I heard that the problem could be caused by the Application Data folder (c:\documents and settings\username\application data\Microsoft\MSN Messenger). So I set out to test that area. Inside the folder are folders with seemingly random numbers, but each of them I presumed were settings for each account I've ever accessed from the computer. To test this I renamed the "MSN Messenger" folder to "MSN Messenger;" as to 'disable' it, and observed what happened during sign in. The 'disabled' folder respawned and inside a single folder was created, which was for the account I was signing into. But I got the "error report" crash again. I then tried my very old account that had worked and after the account specific folder respawned, even that crashed as well. I quickly deleted the new "MSN Messenger" folder that had been automatically created and renamed "MSN Messenger;" back to it's original name. Lo and Behold, the old account (that had worked before, and then later failed to work on deleting its application data) worked again!
SO THE PROBLEM WAS IN THE APPLICATION DATA

Finally, I decided to create a new hotmail account but even that crashed. Which seemed to fit the theory (anything spawned in the application data folder for msn has something in there that causes it to crash). I then looked at the folder for the old account that worked and tried to make sense of all the data files. But there were too many files and too much data to compare, so I began to think... according to the theory, I could use my msn on someone elses computer. So I gave my sign up details to a trusted friend and he was able to sign in. He sent me the application data for my account which had spawned on his computer. I replaced my 'faulty one' with the my friend's and expected it to work. But it didn't (the same crash happened).
I couldn't figure out what that really meant. It had to be that my computer was reading/doing something to the msn application data for my account incorrectly. I don't want to reformat my PC just because of this problem, and I've heard that even after formatting the problem remains (I think that may be a different problem to mine, but I don't want to test it anyway). I checked for viruses using ZoneAlarm, and spyware with SpyBotSearch&Destroy and AdAware, with no results. I'm using XP SP2, and this problem only started recently, during mid january and having used WLM8 for ages with no such major problem. And I have had no hardware changes during this time, nor major software installs that I recall.

So instead of complaining like everyone else I decided to give my findings before I asked for help. There are many of these crash complaints throughout the www and even in this forum, but I figured I'd create a new thread, so that it could be spent on technical issues rather than the "Me too, my msn crashes" posts we always see.

Please if anyone has any idea for testing, ideas on the problem, or own findings after troubleshooting, I'd really appreciate it.

Anton

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