The other night I turned on my computer and when Windows Live tried to sign in, I got an error that the service was unavailable. To me, that sounded like Windows Live was offline for maintenance or something along those lines, so I figured I’d give it some time and try again later.
The next day I was surprised to see that I was still getting this message when I tried to log in. I checked with a friend and he was online, so my “down for maintenance” theory no longer seemed like a valid consideration.
I looked more closely at the error code: 800706be and did some standard Internet searching. Turns out that this highly descriptive and not-at-all-nebulous error code can apply to any number of problems, with solutions ranging from reinstalling/repairing Messenger, cleaning the registry, or just crossing your fingers and waiting a little while.
After a while, I finally stumbled across the fix. Evidently my Windows Live contacts cache had somehow gotten corrupted and the answer was to delete it and allow Windows Live Messenger to recreate it.
In Windows Explorer, I browsed to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Contacts and then delete all subfolders. When I launched Messenger, I was able to log in again.
Posted Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 1:40 pm by peterl
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