Shoutbox

I'm not bashing you either, I really think it would be convenient. Many times you just want to check if a contact is online and the popup would serve that purpose. Then if you want to send him a message you could open the MSN as usual, but the "checking" process would save opening and closing the MSN window.All of the options that you mention are not good alternatives to my suggestion, they all involve much more clicks and in the case of dektop contacts even worse, invading your valuable desktop real estate, unless of course you don't use it for anything else. Yes, the mouse is there to be used, but shortcuts are always welcome to save time. That's just IMHO, otherwise I wouldn't have posted in the first place. I don't pretend that you agree with this, but I'm sure many do agree.

I'm also editing this post answering to your last one rather than posting separately (your quotes in bold italic):
"The "checking" process would not save anything. The process requires to open a window with all your (online) contacts, this is just the same as your contactlist... and the process also would require the manual closing of the window, since it needs to be a scrollable window. There is absolutely no difference..."
That's not true. In case you have a lot of contacts (bigger than would fit in your screen), you can make the popup screen to show your online contacts autoscroll in the same fashion as say stock tickers or the like.Once it autoscrolls one cycle with all your online contacts it auto closes, so no intervention in the user=no clicks at all!
Opening your contactlist doesn't require "much more" clicks. In fact it requires 1 double click, and that's all.
Again you're missing my point. I don't mean to check your online contacts once a days for example. What about if you want to check every 5 minutes? Then double clicking so frequently becomes tedious and an autopopup with the above features becomes convenient
true, but this isn't really a shortcut at all. Even if you don't believe it, it will be a longcut.
Again, such a shortcut becomes meaningful when you have a high frequency of checking on your online contacts. Sort of similar to a stock ticker with refreshable prices versus having to manually refresh a webpage with the stock prices every 5 minutes...
And not to mention if you have MSN Polygamy with more than one client open at the same time...!