This morning when I tried to sign in to MSN Messenger (v7.5.0322) from my XP OS, I was greeted with a prompt about a required update before I could do so and that update was the current Windows Live Messenger (v8.1.0178). I then confirmed the same thing when I tried to sign in from home.

Now, the main reason, I hadn't upgraded yet is because I use the MSN add-on Messenger Plus! for its custom names functionality and there's no automated way to bring this important data into Windows Live Messenger. Therefore, I'd been holding off doing all that work. However, now it appears I don't have much of a choice to put if off any longer.

At first I was fearful though that I'd lost this information as I can't see it without signing in and the corresponding registry entries are encoded.

Thankfully though, I was able to successfully sign in to MSN Messenger (v7.0.0816) from my old W2K OS, so O can collect up the necessary information.

Well, that's it then as I just wanted to pass on my news/findings to make others aware of the situation.

Yeah I heard about this too. Glad you got it sorted though.

They're probably getting ready to shut down the old traffic port from before version 8. Another couple months and older versions probably won't work anymore.

Yeah I really didn't wanna upgrade cause I like my MSN 7.5 but I was sorta afraid my stuff was gonna be gone but I tried it on my sister's computer and lo and behold its still there. I do like the offline messaging its just the interface I don't like for some reason

http://www.pidgin.im/

Hmm, I tried a few multi-messaging clients before Scott and didn't really care for 'em.

I've never heard of that one though, so I'll give it a try. Thanks.

Pidgin is Gaim renamed (essentially). And coincidentally, MSN never worked for me when I tried use pidgin. So it was back to my long time favorite, Trillian.

Works fine here, been running it on Ubuntu 7.04 for a few days, I love it. Nothing compared to Adium for OSX though.

I've been a trillian fan for years also. What kind of issues did you have with MSN & Pidgin?

It was quite weird to be honest. Any time I would try to send a message it would say something like "This message could not be delivered", as if MSN was blocking every message I sent. Now I know they block certain urls (IE stuff like download.php, etc) but I couldn't send anything.

I'm on OS X now though, using Adium.

Yeah that is weird :S. Hmm oh well. Hey did you download Growl for OSX? Works well with Adium. I loved it lol. I wish they made an Adium Windows client. I like the transparency and contact list layout, etc.

Of course. Growl is awesome for all sorts of shit.

I still use AIM 5.5.3590 with DeadAIM

DeadAIM.. isn't that a good description of itself