Contacts always appear offline on windows live messenger

Thanks Devnullius for updating all the different things you've tried. I've had Windows Live Messenger 2011 for about a week (just got a new laptop). It was working fine up till last night when i had the same problem where no one appeared online. Yet when i logged onto my desktop using an older version, it worked fine. This happened after i played around with my antivirus program so i'm wondering if changing the securities parameters had anything to do with it. I'm not a techie, but i did try reinstalling the program several times and played around with windows setting, none of which worked.

I did what Devnullius suggested and downloaded the 2009 version and it's working fine right now. I didn't bother with redownloading the 2011, i figure i didn't want to risk it messing up again. but if all you care about is logging onto msn, then just try downloading an older version. i don't really care about the fancy upgrades of the 2011 version anyways.

hope that helps!