Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins

Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins - Printable Version

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+----- Thread: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins (/showthread.php?tid=83826)

Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by stuartbennett on 05-20-2008 at 04:54 AM

since the release of willz's batman the dark knight skin i have been unable to get the skin imported, this morning i tried to import other skins and discovered that every skin ever made for messenger plus can no longer be successfully imported into plus, i have tried uninstalling plus and clean installing it, ive tried clean installing messenger aswell and neither has any effect, can somebody please advise whats wrong please?

EDIT:

when trying to import a skin i get this:

[Image: SkinError.png]

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by blessedguy on 05-21-2008 at 05:07 PM

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett

Are you using Vista?
Why didn't you say that before??

1.Uninstall Plus!
2.Uninstall Messenger.
3.Use any junk cleaner (CCleaner should do it well) to clean any possible corrupted file that may be crashing Plus! or WLM
4.Re-download an Install both gain
5.Is the error still there?

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by stuartbennett on 05-21-2008 at 05:36 PM

i have just done your suggestion as per your instructions and still im getting the problem.

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by blessedguy on 05-21-2008 at 08:53 PM

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett
i have just done your suggestion as per your instructions and still im getting the problem.

I've done that to solve my problem... if you're still having problems, I don't know what more can be done

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by matty on 05-21-2008 at 08:57 PM

Try and run the skin pack as an administrator. Maybe UAC is causing you a problem.

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by stuartbennett on 05-21-2008 at 09:01 PM

there is no "run as administrator" when right clicking a plsk file so cant try that, besides i am an administrator, its only a recent developement that this has happened i was always able to run skinpacks before this weekend just gone so that in itself eliminates uac as the cause.

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by blessedguy on 05-21-2008 at 09:17 PM

quote:
Originally posted by matty
Try and run the skin pack as an administrator. Maybe UAC is causing you a problem.

UAC is unable of stopping Plus! Skins from working

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett
there is no "run as administrator" when right clicking a plsk file so cant try that, besides i am an administrator, its only a recent developement that this has happened i was always able to run skinpacks before this weekend just gone so that in itself eliminates uac as the cause.

Maybe it oculd be any of the (frequent) Vista updates...
I don't know... I don't install Vista updates untill I'm sure it is working fine

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by Spunky on 05-21-2008 at 11:20 PM

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett
besides i am an administrator

There are 2 different types of Administrator in Vista... You're most likely using the Administrator account, rather than the "SUPER Admin" account anyway

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by stuartbennett on 05-22-2008 at 04:53 AM

theres no such group as super administrator.

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by John Anderton on 05-22-2008 at 09:59 AM

In Vista, despite you being an Admin, apps are run as normal users for security reasons. Which is what UAC is, User Account Control.
If you don't remember switching it off, download the skin plsk, right click and click "Run as Administrator"
It might as you for an admin pass (from a non admin account) after its asked permission to seek elevation else it just asks you to admin authorise it and you're done

This is what matty was referring too.

Update: Can't run plsk as admin
I have another solution. Am typing it out now =p

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by Spunky on 05-22-2008 at 10:18 AM

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett
theres no such group as super administrator.

It is not called Super Admin, it's just what I called it. On XP you have Admins or Limited accounts. Vista is different by having limited users, admins and THE administrator account. admin accounts on vista are not as powerful as THE one admin account. I wanted to make sure you were aware of this as it may cause problems in the future for you if you try to do things as admin, although I'm sure that it is not your problem now

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by John Anderton on 05-22-2008 at 11:27 AM

Also, I forgot to say this in my first post.. this was the reason I came into this thread..
The title of the thread is "Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins" well.. "Messenger Plus" never had skinning support. "Messenger Plus! Live" did

And yeah... I know you have Messenger Plus! Live and not Messenger Plus! (or even "Messenger Plus" for that matter ) installed on your comp

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by blessedguy on 05-22-2008 at 04:35 PM

quote:
Originally posted by SpunkyLoveMuff

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett
theres no such group as super administrator.

It is not called Super Admin, it's just what I called it. On XP you have Admins or Limited accounts. Vista is different by having limited users, admins and THE administrator account. admin accounts on vista are not as powerful as THE one admin account. I wanted to make sure you were aware of this as it may cause problems in the future for you if you try to do things as admin, although I'm sure that it is not your problem now

In fact, no one can be that Super Admin (well, in fact, is a #sudo like thingy), only have temporary permission to do that. Installing programs for example, require the admin to allow the super admin allow the installation.
That doesn't matter now... but I can say i'm pretty sure it is a Vista bug, Vista also has problems with some features Skins and Scripts provide... don't worry, it will disapear one day, maybe randomly...

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by stuartbennett on 05-22-2008 at 09:18 PM

if this had been occuring since 4.50 when messenger plus live introduced skinning then i might have agreed with you that its a vista bug, however as its only occured over the past week then the simplist explanation is that messenger plus live 4.60.326 is somehow causing the problem and that the installation of this newest build of messenger plus live causes such deep curruption of the vista operating system that installing the build will force skin users to have to reformat their pc's everytime they wish to import a new skin, this is the only logical explanation i can think of.

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by blessedguy on 05-22-2008 at 09:48 PM

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett
if this had been occuring since 4.50 when messenger plus live introduced skinning then i might have agreed with you that its a vista bug, however as its only occured over the past week then the simplist explanation is that messenger plus live 4.60.326 is somehow causing the problem and that the installation of this newest build of messenger plus live causes such deep curruption of the vista operating system that installing the build will force skin users to have to reformat their pc's everytime they wish to import a new skin, this is the only logical explanation i can think of.

Hmm... 4.60.326 works fine with my Vista =/
Don't worry... it will be Ok somehow... at least you didn't get Traces for all skins you were currectly using!

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by Willz on 05-23-2008 at 12:25 AM

Yeah I haven't any issues on vista whatsoever, both my work and testing machine run it and I have never had an issue. If there was something this serious going on with vista it would have been picked up during the beta tests. Theres probably something deeper to the problem. Maybe another program is clashing with Plus! (it has happened in the past with other stuff i.e WindowBlinds)

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by blessedguy on 05-23-2008 at 01:59 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Willz
Yeah I haven't any issues on vista whatsoever, both my work and testing machine run it and I have never had an issue. If there was something this serious going on with vista it would have been picked up during the beta tests. Theres probably something deeper to the problem. Maybe another program is clashing with Plus! (it has happened in the past with other stuff i.e WindowBlinds)

It is really hard to know what is it... for me, that happened right after I updated my Vista, one day. Then just updated another day and everything was nice again!

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by Jarrod on 05-23-2008 at 07:41 AM

i haven't had any problems with vista sp 1 all the updates

quote:
Originally posted by SpunkyLoveMuff

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett
theres no such group as super administrator.

It is not called Super Admin, it's just what I called it. On XP you have Admins or Limited accounts. Vista is different by having limited users, admins and THE administrator account. admin accounts on vista are not as powerful as THE one admin account. I wanted to make sure you were aware of this as it may cause problems in the future for you if you try to do things as admin, although I'm sure that it is not your problem now

exactly it;s like the difference between root access and admin access

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by blessedguy on 05-23-2008 at 01:02 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Jarrod
i haven't had any problems with vista sp 1 all the updates

That's why I think it is random... My Vista is also up-to-date and Plus! works perfectly.

stuart, have you already tried to import from the Plus! Menus?

RE: RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by CookieRevised on 05-23-2008 at 02:16 PM

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett
the simplist explanation is that messenger plus live 4.60.326 is somehow causing the problem and that the installation of this newest build of messenger plus live causes such deep curruption of the vista operating system that installing the build will force skin users to have to reformat their pc's everytime they wish to import a new skin, this is the only logical explanation i can think of.

Simpliest explanation is deep core corruption??? a reformat?????? I think that's taking it all way too far.

Also, what do you mean by "I can not install skins". Remember that skin packs are actually nothing more than renamed ZIP files. So the first thing to see/test is if a renamed zip can be unzipped and imported.

Reinstalling Plus! will solve nothing at all in such cases. And reformatting niether.

And seeing that error, there is nothing to indicate that this is a fault of Plus! or Vista since it says that the file, the skin pack, is corrupted.... So, the first thing to check would be if you actually have downloaded a valid skin pack. Most of such corruption errors are caused by a bad download connection or a download which ended too soon (and thus the file didn't got downloaded fully). And since most browsers store stuff in their cache, redownloading will not help either, unless you first clear the cache.

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by stuartbennett on 05-23-2008 at 09:06 PM

ok well i do srta see where you coming from but some food for thought, since uninstalling everything related to messenger and reinstalling i tried reimported my own skin using the exact same file i sent to the database back in april that wasnt downloaded from net i created it so it cant be file curruption as otherwise every user of 365 would have this problem.

if i rename to a .zip file and paste the extracted folder into the messenger plus live skins directory the skin will work it just wont work with a .plsk extension, im running vista with sp1 and have installed all updates, the issue occured out of the blue i only noticed it after the release of willz's batman skin but the last major change to plus that was rather recent was the installation of plus live 4.60.326, uninstalling 326 and reverting to 324 doesnt fix it but without formatting my pc and clean installing 324 i cant be 100% sure, for now 326 seems the logical cause of the issue i just dont know what it is in 326 that causes the issue specifically.

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by matty on 05-23-2008 at 10:19 PM

quote:
Originally posted by blessedguy

quote:
Originally posted by SpunkyLoveMuff

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett
theres no such group as super administrator.

It is not called Super Admin, it's just what I called it. On XP you have Admins or Limited accounts. Vista is different by having limited users, admins and THE administrator account. admin accounts on vista are not as powerful as THE one admin account. I wanted to make sure you were aware of this as it may cause problems in the future for you if you try to do things as admin, although I'm sure that it is not your problem now
In fact, no one can be that Super Admin (well, in fact, is a #sudo like thingy), only have temporary permission to do that. Installing programs for example, require the admin to allow the super admin allow the installation.
That doesn't matter now... but I can say i'm pretty sure it is a Vista bug, Vista also has problems with some features Skins and Scripts provide... don't worry, it will disapear one day, maybe randomly...

I beg to differ!

code:
net user administrator /active:yes

The above line will enable the Hidden Administrator account the end all be all of user accounts. However there is something called Session 0 in Windows Vista. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/vista/services.mspx

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by CookieRevised on 05-24-2008 at 03:21 AM

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett
ok well i do srta see where you coming from but some food for thought, since uninstalling everything related to messenger and reinstalling i tried reimported my own skin using the exact same file i sent to the database back in april that wasnt downloaded from net i created it
...
if i rename to a .zip file and paste the extracted folder into the messenger plus live skins directory the skin will work it just wont work with a .plsk extension

This very vital information makes the situation different and already way more clear than before.

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett
im running vista with sp1 and have installed all updates, the issue occured out of the blue i only noticed it after the release of willz's batman skin but the last major change to plus that was rather recent was the installation of plus live 4.60.326, uninstalling 326 and reverting to 324 doesnt fix it but without formatting my pc and clean installing 324 i cant be 100% sure

Again, formatting will not fix any issues Plus! would have. Reinstalling an older version of Plus! will be more than sufficient to make sure you have the old version of Plus!. You could even manully delete all the files of Plus! in its installation directory (and the msimg32.dll) for that matter and be sure that everything of the Plus! program is removed. Because Plus! will not put any files on your HDD outside its installation directory (except for user data like sounds files and maybe log files, but those user files have got no influence at all on the installation). The same goes for the registry settings....

In short, if you reinstall build 324 over 326, you'll have 324.

As such:

quote:
Originally posted by stuartbennett
for now 326 seems the logical cause of the issue i just dont know what it is in 326 that causes the issue specifically.

326 is not the cause since you say you also have it when build 324 is installed.

--

Btw: I assume that if you manually try to import the skin you'll get the same error? By manual importing I mean executing MPTools.exe with the proper parameters:

MPTools.exe /ImportSkin="C:\blablah\theskin.plsk"
(mind the quotes)

RE: Messenger Plus No Longer Supports Skins by stuartbennett on 05-24-2008 at 06:29 AM

to clarify if i go into plus preferences go to customise and then to skins and click the import button and select the file then import works fine, if i go straight to the skinpacks folder and merely double click on it then i get this error.