{"id":88,"date":"2006-11-09T21:25:07","date_gmt":"2006-11-09T21:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/2006\/11\/microsoft-intent-to-ruin-my-friendships\/"},"modified":"2006-11-09T21:25:07","modified_gmt":"2006-11-09T21:25:07","slug":"microsoft-intent-to-ruin-my-friendships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/2006\/11\/microsoft-intent-to-ruin-my-friendships\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Intent To Ruin My Friendships"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" align=\"right\" alt=\"Windows Live Messenger logo\" id=\"image87\" src=\"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/11\/windows-live-messsenger-logo.jpg\" \/>Ever since I installed Windows Live Messenger a month or so ago I&#039;ve been unable to add contacts or be added as a contact by others. For a while I was modest enough to assume people had just lied about adding me, but then some more serious requirements for adding people came up and I realised that there was a problem.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, after much searching, I came across <a title=\"Google Groups: microsoft.public.msn.messenger Post\" href=\"http:\/\/groups.google.com\/group\/microsoft.public.msn.messenger\/browse_thread\/thread\/a4b7cf0909ff4d3e\/d731735d4daa31dd%23d731735d4daa31dd\">this post<\/a> on the Microsoft newsgroups (link courtesy of Google archiving, yay). Someone had the same problem as me, despite the results of my &#034;research&#034; (read: Googling) this evening seeming to imply that very few people have run into it.<\/p>\n<p>Essentially it came down to an error in the cache that WLM saves in:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>C:\\Documents and Settings[username]\\Contacts<\/li>\n<li>C:\\Documents and Settings[username]\\Local Settings\\Application Data\\Microsoft\\Windows Live Contacts<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I deleted both folders, and later found out I only really needed to delete the <em>contactcoll.cache<\/em> files but since the whole of both folders is just cache anyway, I hadn&#039;t lost any data.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Make sure Messenger is shut down and then try removing these folders on your PC. Just so you know, it&#039;s simply a contact cache, you won&#039;t lose anything by doing so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>After doing this, I found I was unable to sign-in to Messenger. But, lo and behold the same newsgroup thread had an answer for that, too: running <a href=\"http:\/\/messenger.jonathankay.com\/downloads\/remove_wlmpolicies.reg\">this registry fix<\/a> removed some broken policy file and set everything back to normal again.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Your particular problem must&#039;ve been a problem in the contact cache, which doesn&#039;t surprise me as al <em>[sic]<\/em> the caches in WLM have been quite problematic since it was released.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I signed in and was immediately bombarded with five &#034;add contact&#034; request boxes that must have piled up over the month&#8230; one of which was serious and the others which I was just relieved to find had actually been sent after all. So, apologies to those whom I seemed to be ignoring by not accepting their add requests.<\/p>\n<p><em>Bloody Microsoft&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since I installed Windows Live Messenger a month or so ago I&#039;ve been unable to add contacts or be added as a contact by others. For a while I was modest enough to assume people had just lied about adding me, but then some more serious requirements for adding people came up and I realised that there was a problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[9,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}