Shoutbox

Have you at least checked if the settings are as I've shown? I'm curious to know if something has changed there.

Another thing you could do is to repair or uninstall/reinstall Messenger Plus!, have you tried that? Wich version of Messenger Plus! (Live) do you have (Plus > About..full number please)?

I Actually completely uninstalled and reinstalled plus as the first thing I tried and those settings are the same, although in XP it looks slightly different.

Is there still no ideas on this? It really is incredibly annoying =/

thanks for the screenshots.

I would say that IE is probably screwed-up in one way or another on your system (or you have a faulty add-on installed). I suggest you try resetting/disabling all your IE addons and reinstalling IE8. Let us know if that works.

Thanks for the suggestion but still no luck =/ (I have no browser extensions FYI, apart from the QTBreadcrumbs bar)