I believe i have found the problem (not the solution unfortuantly). I think it has something to do with personal firewalls because i tried everything on this board and nothing worked, I also tried turning off my firewall to log in but still didnt work. I decided in the end that they only way to get it working was to reinstall windows and as soon as i had done this i downloaded msn messenger and installed it. It worked first time with no problems but when i decided to install my norton firewall and then tried to use messenger it came up with the same old message of ‘cannot connect….maybe something worng with your connection bla, bla, bla…..’. Firewall was configured correctly to allow messenger to connect properly but it just doesnt. I then uninstalled firewall and, to no surprise, messenger started working again. Maybe someone else might want to try this and just see if the personal firewall is the problem.