Hi,

I had this same problem. I am using MSN Messenger 6 and Windows XP it would not upgrade to the latest version. I tried some of the solutions in this forum but they did not work. I found something that worked for me.

Disclaimer: I work as a software developer so for the less technical this might be a bit daunting..

This is what I did:

• Close MSN Messenger
• Download MSN Messenger 5.0 from http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=msnm
• Rename C:Program FilesMSN Messenger to zzMSN Messenger (it wont be found but you can restore later if you need to)
• Open regedit (start > run > regedit) – Warning: be careful in there
• Goto HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftMSNMessenger
• Rename it to zzMSNMessenger
• Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftMessengerService
• Rename it to zzMessengerService
• Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftMSNMessenger
• Rename it to zzMSNMessenger
• Install MSN Messenger 5.0 (if you can’t install you might have to use the “Windows installer clean up” tool described in this thread to remove the installation information for MSN Messenger 6 – I did this before I tried to install v5 but I am not sure if it is required)
• Run MSN Messenger 5 and check that it can logon
• Download MSN Messenger 6 from http://messenger.msn.com/Download/
• Install it and it should upgrade to v6
• Check that it can logon

If you can’t get it to work you can rename everything from zz back to the original names.

I found it helpful to turn on logging when installing the MSI packages. To do this you need to open the MSN Messenger Setup EXE with winzip and extract the contents into a folder. Then open a command window (start > run > cmd.exe) and go to the folder with the MSI packages then run %windir%system32msiexec.exe /i msnmsgs.msi /l*v msnmsgs.log You can then read the log file that is created to get more info.

Hope this helps 🙂

Ross