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Just remembered about this emoticon ‘bug’ in Windows Live Messenger which occurs when you hover over the 
emoticon and the *-) emoticon in the Show All Emoticons Window.
Not really sure if this occurs with builds of Windows Live Messenger other than 8.1.0178.00, see for yourself
Anyway, look at the screenshot below to see what I mean:
A new version of Windows Live Messenger 8.1 beta is now available at the usual download location. The build number for this release is 168.
I can’t find any official announcement regarding this update, but I imagine the changes are bug fixes. Nicole has blogged about it at the Windows Live Messenger team Space saying they’ve made changes based on user feedback. Can anyone spot anything different?
I’ve recently been exploring a bug in how WLM handles emoticons. So far to replicate the problem you have to flood your contact with the same emoticon.
Click the image to the right for full sized example.
After you’ve done this, if you hold down shift+enter (newline) for a long time you will randomly get new emoticons in the text input area. This has been replicated with version 8.0.0812 and 8.1.0068, with and without Messenger Plus! Live. It also seems to work with custom and standard icons.
Discuss this in the forums.
Doobies posted on the forum how they were able to stop Windows Live Messenger from crashing as soon as it signs in:
In “C:\Documents and Settings\<your user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft” there is two folders one called “Windows Live Contacts” and one called “Messenger” I deleted both of these and now I’m not having any problems.
The folder Messenger is data for the Sharing Folders feature, and the Windows Live Contacts folder appears to be where the list cache is now stored in Windows Live Messenger, as opposed to ListCache.dat in MSN Messenger 6.x and 7.x. The sub-folders in Windows Live Contacts are the sign-in addresses of all users that have signed in on that Windows account, and there are two sub-folders in each of those: real and shadow. The data in these folders seems to be what is encrypted when you enable Encrypt contact list data so that it is not accessible outside of Windows Live Messenger.
I’m not sure why it just isn’t encrypted by default, or why e-mail addresses are used instead of Passport IDs in the Windows Live Contacts folder.
I earlier made a program called List Cache Deleter which lets you remove ListCache.dat if it becomes corrupt and you are unable to sign in.