MSN Messenger Soaks up nearly 100% CPU...

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Looks like if you don't have a valid network connection when MSN Messenger starts up, it'll quite happily soak up nearly 100% cpu.

No idea why. Looks like a pretty annoying bug - especially as it makes it difficult to bring up Task Manager to kill the damn thing.

Ah well.

About the author

Simon Cooke is an occasional video game developer, ex-freelance journalist, screenwriter, film-maker, musician, and software engineer in Seattle, WA.

The views posted on this blog are his and his alone, and have no relation to anything he's working on, his employer, or anything else and are not an official statement of any kind by them (and barely even one by him most of the time).

Archived Wordpress comments
Alan Robertson wrote on Tuesday, October 4, 2005:

I’m getting this too - has anyone else had similar problems or know of any fix?

Anonymous wrote on Sunday, October 16, 2005:

I have the same and I notice I got that problem when I upgraded to 7.5. Never had this kind of problems in ver 7.0. Havnt found a solution yet…

Anonymous wrote on Monday, December 19, 2005:

have the same and I notice I got that problem when I upgraded to 7.5.
Lets try to reinstall 7,0 version

Anonymous wrote on Friday, January 6, 2006:

Also having this kind of issues…
It´s really a pain because I can´t even see what my contacts were writing while I am away…

Anonymous wrote on Thursday, January 12, 2006:

Im having the same problem.. its ramdom, sometime works all day, sometimes cant work for more than 5 minutes. Didn’t happend with 7. Im runnig Intel with hyperthreading, how bout you guys?

Anonymous wrote on Tuesday, January 17, 2006:

I’m getting this too… Im running amd athlon… so its not the cpu…

Anonymous wrote on Wednesday, February 15, 2006:

Same thing here, after upgrade to 7.5

Anonymous wrote on Friday, March 3, 2006:

same problem but only when a conversation window is focused, how bigger is the conversation, more 100% cpu is reached

G wrote on Sunday, March 5, 2006:

i noticed messenger doing it when i have my contacts avatar open if i close it cpu usage drops down to normal. Has anyone found that this solves it, albeit temporarally

Anonymous wrote on Friday, August 11, 2006:

msmsgs.exe is not MSN Messenger 7, it’s actually the old Windows Messenger. Open up the old Windows Messenger, go to options and disable it from running, alerting, all that stuff.

Anonymous wrote on Wednesday, August 16, 2006:

I found this on another website and it fixed the problem for me. Results were immediate.

“Although I can’t say this is reproducible here, you might try turning off the Messenger
functionality within Outlook.

To do so, click the Tools menu in Outlook, then choose Options, choose the Other tab, uncheck
“Enable the Person Names Smart Tag” and click OK.”

Anonymous wrote on Saturday, November 25, 2006:

Guys this is ridiculous, everytime a change is produced for Messanger it just makes it heavier and full of crap.
Why Microsoft if not capable of making something functional and leaving it working fine for the people that has fun using it??
I thinl is a gates legacy, for those who enjoy just chat use tmsnc from a linux machine, works perfect. :)

Anonymous wrote on Monday, January 14, 2008:

Use Miranda32 instead

Anonymous wrote on Monday, September 27, 2010:

Thanks!!
The Tip: “I found this on another website and it fixed the problem for me. Results were immediate…“
Works!
Bye!

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