If you’ve been getting errors when trying to sign in for the last few hours, it may be because of some service downtime. The service status page is reporting temporarily experiencing difficulty.
Sign In
The .NET Messenger Service is temporarily experiencing difficulty. You may be unable to sign in. Please try again later.
Last Update: 4/12/2007 3:00:00 PM Pacific Time (GMT -8:00)
As it says, just try again later. It doesn’t appear to be very widespread, I’m having no problems signing in and have the usual number of contacts online. But, traffic to this Web site has increased a little, so there’s definitely something going on.
Last September the same problem could be solved by changing the server which Messenger connects to, I’ve just tested it and it still works.
Update: Looks like I posted this shortly after the problem had already started to come right, I even missed the acknowledgment from Nicole at the Windows Live Messenger blog.
There have been many users having problems signing in for the last few days. Reports claim that Windows Live Messenger doesn’t complete the sign in process, instead just sitting there with the messenger sign in buddies continuing to spin until you cancel. One of the most likely causes is this month’s round of security updates for Windows.
Among all the posts for help in the newsgroups, Jimmymac posted (6th post down) explaining he fixed it by deleting messenger’s registry settings. Jonathan Kay created a .reg file that will automatically delete the settings for you, remove_msgrsettings.reg.
Before running the .reg file, completely exit Windows Live Messenger by right clicking the buddy icon near the clock and clicking Exit. Once you have run the file and clicked Yes, try signing in again.
One of the side effects of this solution is you will lose some customised settings, but hopefully you’ll find it’s worth it!
Leave a comment if this does or doesn’t work for you.
Many users are currently experiencing trouble signing into Messenger getting error 8100031. Mario posted in the current forum topic on the issue with some instructions on how to temporarily get around it.
Add the following to entries to your hosts file:
65.54.239.80 messenger.hotmail.com
65.54.239.80 dp.msnmessenger.akadns.net
As he states, it’s a fairly dirty fix. Be sure to remove the two entries once the problem has been resolved on the server end. This post will be updated when that happens.
Update: Looks like it is now fixed for most users, make sure to revert any changes you made to your hosts file.
List Cache Deleter allows you to delete list cache files for accounts used with MSN Messenger. This is sometimes needed due to a bug in MSN Messenger which causes it to lose track of the list cache version and sends a blank string to the server as the current cache version, which makes it unable to sign in.
