When I upgraded to Live Messenger, ALL the custom emoticons went POOF***.  I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, to no avail.  I then uninstalled and reinstalled Plus!...to no avail.

Is there a way to recover them?  I would appreciate your help...thanks.

I know that the threads here say that they should be retained, but if so, they went invisible on me.

please use the search feature and have a look around because this is the same problem as your, with a solution.

I ran a search as suggested by MattyRid, but the search function did not reveal any other potential solutions.  I downloaded the tool developed by ZoRoNax, but it wouldn't load.  It had been developed to address his problem which was identical to mine.  Are there any others who have had this problem and have found solutions?  Please note that I am far from an expert in computerese.  Thanks.

OK lets work one thing out...are you going from MSN Messenger 7.5 -> Windows Live messenger or upgrading your current version of Windows Live Messenger the 8.1 BETA?

I was going from MSN Messenger 7.5 to Windows Live Messenger when the custom emoticons all disappeared.

OK so that part is fine, now when you downloaded the tool, did you have any problems downloading it, extracting it or running it?

I had no problems downloading it. or extracting it.  However, when I clicked on it to run, I got a ".NET Framework Initialization Error" which said: "C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.5072\mscorwks.dll could not be loaded"

check you have the .NET framework v2 installed which you can get from From this age at the Microsoft Website

I installed .Net framework v2 and then ran the tool.  None of the custom emoticons showed up in Live Windows.  Thanks for your efforts.