WIndows Messenger signs out by itself

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.messenger (More info?)

"fsimard" <fsimard@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:C197B7B1-3AD0-4AF6-BFAB-ED5AE345DBE1@microsoft.com...
>I have Windows Messenger 5.1 installed on my PC. I am running under XP Pro,
> SP2. I can sign into my account with no problems, but Messenger will
> spontaneously sign out very once in a while. The sign out seems to happen
> when the status of one of my contacts changes. Messenger will not display
> that it has signed out until I try to send something to one of my contacts,
> at which point I will get the "sign in" Window.When I sign in, I then see
> that the status of one of my contacts has changed, every time. Has anyone
> else experienced similar spontaneous "sign outs" with Windows Messenger, and
> have you found a way to resolve the problem? It is obviously very
> troublesome!

Bingo. I have exactly the same problem, and have had for about a year now. I posted on the
newsgroups when it first starting happening but got no repsonse that fixed the issue. I'm currently
running WM 5.1.0639, but obviously I had a couple of previous versions before that. I experience
exactly the same problem - random signouts with no interaction on my behalf. Although I can't prove
it, it's often the case that it will sign out while I'm sitting at the PC doing something else, then
I'll suddenly get signed off and when I sign in a second later the only difference is that one of my
contacts has come online. Once or twice I've actually seen the "toast" pop up only to get destroyed
immediately when I get signed off. I'm using Windows XP Pro SP2, though the problem started way
before SP2 was released. Often the way I'll notice this is that I'll have set myself away, only to
come back to my computer some time later to find my status is "online", because it's signed me out
then re-tried to connect automatically. I've been scanning the newsgroups periodically to find
others with the same symptoms, but it seems to be quite a rare problem. However the fact that one or
two people have reported exactly the same thing has me convinced that either a) it's a common
misconfig with a local system or firewall, or b) there is some problem in the WM code, possibly
related to status changes in contacts. Because it's such a rare thing to see reported, and that it's
remained unfixed for a year or more, I have little hope that Microsoft is even aware there's a
problem in this area. Even if it is a user/ISP configuration problem, Messenger should do all it can
to alert users to it.

Andrew