Unable to sign in to Windows Live Messenger–Error 81000490

 

Ok, so I’ve been getting the above error on my Windows7 netbook for a while now.  The official reason for the error is ‘the service may be temporarily unavailable’.

I found that I could log in fine on the netbook using a different Live account, and the problem account worked fine on a desktop PC, which pointed to the problem being somewhere in the Windows profile on the netbook, and not a service problem.

I tried an uninstall and reinstall of WLM, which made no difference.

I then used the ‘forget me’ option on the login screen – this also made no difference.

I then found that for each Live account, there is a folder at the following location:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live\Contacts

The folder names are the email address for the related Windows Live accounts.

I simply deleted the folder for the problem account, at which point I was able to login to WLM without a problem.

(If you get an error when trying to delete the folder, make sure that WLM is not running, then if you still get an error, check in Task Manager for the wlcomm.exe process, and end it if present.)

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