Shoutbox

LexDozel,

1) Actually, and unfortunately, most people do not search (properly). This is proven a lot, time and again.

2) Again I can assure you that the official fix and even those official sites in general, are not found that regulary by most people (unfortunatly). And as such, stuff said there is not tried out first. If it is tried, it is actually usually done as a last resort when more damage is already done. The sole fact that many people don't even click on Help in Messenger, heck, don't even know it exists, says a lot. This again is proven time and again.

Many of those official fixes do work. In fact, I still need to come across one that does not work!! However, the problem is quite often that people do not understand them, don't follow them properly, or actually are having a different or additional problem than for what the fix is meant for (because they are indeed not always very clear though).

The same for this particular problem. 2 friends of mine, and one family member had exact the same problems described in this thread after upgrading. And although one of them also did the DLL renaming, they eventually let me access their PC and I could fix it without a problem using that official fix (after doing other (official) fixes to solve other problems first though!).

One of their problem was that they most likely messed things up in the past. Of course, not everybody is computer-literate, but that also means that people who are not so PC-literate should follow advise from people who are. And if they still would have problems, they should ask for help to someone with access to their PC to fix it for them. Because as said, instructions are rarely followed properly - they aren't always very clear either though, that's very true). And if there are still problems, one should contact Support. Again something which is very rarely done in situations likes this (because it is again no so clear how to contact them and/or some people think they wont/cant help anyways).

3) You will eventually need to use the latest version. Or use an alternative like Trillian if you don't like it. Downgrading will not always work and is, in case of Messenger, almost never a good thing to do.

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I can understand that many people see this DLL-'solution' as the real fix though. But that is simply because they _see_ that they can sign in again, and as far as they are concearned that was the problem. However, and this is very typical, they do not see that they, by applying that 'solution', actually cripple Messenger even more! This also results in future proper fixes and upgrades to fail, etc, etc, and posts like yours which insist in telling people that official fixes do not work.

The only thing that should/can be done is starting from scratch. Removing all the mess that people have tried and reinstall everything. But again here is a big problem because not everybody knows how to install Messenger properly from scratch. Unfortunatly this is not as simple as it should be (and that is for a big part the fault of MS, absolutely). As a result, those people again complain that it does not work and it is again 'proof' for them that such solutions like the DLL renaming _is_ the real fix.

It is a real vicious circle.

Why do you think that all the people, aka common residents, on these forums never have such (severe) problems? It is because they have the knowhow of how to fix things, know the official sites and know how to follow those official fixes properly.

It are mostly newbies, no offense to them, who have problems with it. And that is, as I said before, because they follow bad advise or have followed bad advise in the past. That is not entirely their own fault of course, because they do not know (can't know) what is good advise and what is bad advise.

Don't get me wrong, MS isn't holy and they do make mistakes. They also make mistakes in Messenger. They also don't always make it easy to fix something, or even find their help/support, etc. And a lot can still be improved. But if they provide a solution for a particular problem, it does work in 99,9% of all the cases, provided you follow their advise to the letter, don't skip anything (eventhough you think you don't need to do a step or you don't understand a step), you know what you're doing, and you actually follow the correct advise for your particular problem and not some other problem.

As such, we are here to try to help people too with the proper fixes, not with half-arsed stuff which actually does not fix anything at all.

And, I repeat, renaming that DLL will _not_ fix the real problem and will actually cause more (hidden) problems in the long run. Instead, one should follow official fixes or advise from knowledgable people which you can find on these forums for example.

If you have further problems, please contact Support and give proper, detailed and full descriptions of your problems, instead of applying half-arsed solutions. But this is again something which is often not done right (because not everybody knows howto because they are not that pc-literate) with the result that people again think the official solutions/support does not work.

In the mean while, for this particular upgrading problem, we will continue to tell people that renaming or deleting that DLL is not the proper solution and will cause you even more problems. Because those are the facts.