Shoutbox

Hi people. Well, a friend of mine brought me his computer because he can't sign in into Messenger.

This is the story: about two months ago, he had a virus so he took his PC to a shop. I have no idea what they did there, the thing is that they removed the virus but MSN Messenger stopped working. So he started using Windows Messenger. But a couple of weeks ago, it stopped working too.

I checked it and didn't find anything weird. Except for Windows Messenger that wouldn't obey to the "do not run on background" option. Even if you killed it, it would reappear after some time (TaskInfo said it was started with the "-Embedding" parameter and started by services.exe IIRC).

When you clicked the sign in button, Messenger 7.0 did nothing at all. I removed all the saved accounts (Tools > Options > General > Accounts and passwords > Change) and then the enter user & pass dialog finally appeared, but when trying to login, it showed an error instantly (sorry, I don't remember the error number - I googled for it but couldn't find anything, just a few results that had nothing to do with this).

After that, I did a clean reinstall of MSN Messenger 7.0, but still didn't work. Then I tried resetting Internet Explorer's settings to default. And fixing IE by reinstalling it (with a command I don't remember right now). Messenger kept giving the same error.
I also tried updating to MSN Messenger 7.5. Still doesn't work, and now it doesn't even show an error message, you click sign in and nothing happens at all. The connection troubleshooter says there's an error with the ports, but can't repair it (this is not because of the firewall or the connection settings BTW, they are alright).

*Any* ideas? (Besides reformatting ) Everything else works fine and the system runs pretty fast. It has Norton Antivirus (BTW, while doing all of this, I disabled Norton and killed other unnecessary programs).

Thanks.