Shoutbox

Based upon the posts of SteveC and MartyS (Windows Live Messenger support and test manager) in the Official Windows Live Messenger Newsgroup:


Explanation

Issues which all boiled down to the same cause:

- Attempting to login but all you get is eternally spinning buddies
- Login works but you can't add contacts
- Login works but you don't get any contacts
- Error codes when signing in (for example 81000314)

Cause of problems:

1. An outage in one of the data centers which prevented some people from updating or accessing their contacts.
   
   This has been fixed, but contacts added during this outage will unfortunatly be lost and need to be added again.
   
   
2. Some back end systems had trouble with the handshaking (technicial term to indicate the communication protocol between systems): Messenger was trying to send a request for the contact list and the response it was getting was't what was expected due to modifications on other back end systems.
   
   This was fixed last night (oct. 17th 2006), but there are still people who might not be able to sign in or add contacts, etc: Those people who tried to log in at the exact time when an errorneous handshake was in effect.
   
   To fix this you need to delete the cache of this handshake policy. Once this cache is deleted a new and fixed handshake can take place and the errors will be gone.

Fix

Delete you handshaking policy cache:

1. Exit Messenger completely (this means right clicking the Messenger tray icon and choosing Exit).
   
   
2. Open your registry editor (Start > Run > regedit.exe) and navigate to:
      for Messenger 8.0: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger
      for Messenger 8.1: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Communications Client
   
   
3. Once there, you must remove the following subkeys:
      for Messenger 8.0: Policies
      for Messenger 8.1: Shared
   
   
4. Close your registry editor and restart Messenger.

Make sure you don't delete or modify anything else. Wrong alterations can cause serious problems for Windows. For those who are not comfortable editing the registry, I've made a registry file which will do these alterations (steps 2 and 3) for you. Simply download the file, save it, and run it (eg: by double clicking on it):

http://home.scarlet.be/~tsf54471/msn/deletehandshakingcache.reg

nothing will be lost when applying this fix, unlike with some other 'fixes'.