About
Hi I’m Jonathan Kay. I was a Microsoft MVP for 13 years, 10 of them being for Windows Live Messenger.
If you have any feedback or questions, let me know! You can find out more about me personally at my personal web site.
Thanks for visiting and I hope you find the content here useful in your Messenger and communication endeavours.
Jonathan Kay, MessengerGeek 
Is anyone having trouble with video not loading now as of Dec 2, 2014? I used it on Dec 1, all was fine now it just won’t connect, but I don’t get any error codes. I am using Windows 8, & the reviver is 2.2.3 for 2009 version. I’ve repaired & reinstalled reviver, but no joy. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Been using the reviver for a long time. but it seems like voice and video stopped working
This is under investigation but I’m afraid I can’t duplicate it personally – it still works for me (and others I’ve tested with), which makes it more difficult to sort out.
Just wondering… is it possible to “revive” the MSN games as well? :O
I’m hoping you can help me with this problem that appears to be related to livecomm.exe When I turn off my Windows 8.1 machine it takes an awfully long time (4 or 5 minutes) for the system to power down. Even worse, the machine will reboot itself after this delay even though I initiated a shut down. Looking at the event viewer I see the following message repeated 8 or 10 times:
LiveComm (6564) C:\Users\dad\AppData\Local\Packages\microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\LiveComm\99d7febea18c22ee\120712-0049\: A request to read from the file “C:\Users\dad\AppData\Local\Packages\microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\LiveComm\99d7febea18c22ee\120712-0049\DBStore\livecomm.edb” at offset 5201920 (0x00000000004f6000) for 8192 (0x00002000) bytes succeeded, but took an abnormally long time (64 seconds) to be serviced by the OS. In addition, 2 other I/O requests to this file have also taken an abnormally long time to be serviced since the last message regarding this problem was posted 83 seconds ago. This problem is likely due to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware vendor for further assistance diagnosing the problem.
My smart disk diagnostics show no problems with my hard drive and I have not seen any error messages associated with disk reads. I find various reports of this error occurring but nos mention of it related to slow shutdown ot spontaneous reboots. The only cure for the various problems reported (such as livecomm using a lot of CPU time) is to uninstall the messenger/mail/contacts apps. I don’t use these since I have Classic Shell installed and do all my work from the desktop.
But I’d like to understand what is causing this problem. I’ve had this machine for about a year and only in the last couple of months has this problem surfaced.
Thanks for any advice or help you can give.
Correction in re previous message. Below is the message that gets repeated several times. The one quoted in my first message was the last in the series–which apparently happened when I forced a manual shutdown.
LiveComm (6564) C:\Users\dad\AppData\Local\Packages
\microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState
\LiveComm\99d7febea18c22ee\120712-0049\: A request to read from
the file “C:\Users\dad\AppData\Local\Packages
\microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState
\LiveComm\99d7febea18c22ee\120712-0049\DBStore\livecomm.edb” at
offset 3112960 (0x00000000002f8000) for 8192 (0x00002000) bytes
has not completed for 36 second(s). This problem is likely due
to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware vendor for
further assistance diagnosing the problem.
if someone install the msn reviver…. is it possible to add someone? or just for facebook contacts?
I have only just found reviver and it is so good to have Messenger back – I never really liked Skype, so moved to Pidgen, but that doesn’t work anymore. Wish I had know about reviver when they close it down – but why they did seems bizarre.. A huge thanks
Thank you, thank you! Skype is such a mundane messenger to use! I miss the unique things that the Live Messenger had! Custom emoticons, how I missed you! ❤ Thank you so much!
Having a hard time getting my MSN back….Help.
Why we can’t use MSN 2009 ?
Because the servers needed for Messenger 2009 and prior versions no longer exist.
I was wondering if you had an plans for/ knew of a way to access it on mobile? Me and my friends are happy to switch back but I spend most of my chatting time at work ><
Your best option on phones is to use Skype for Messenger use. It supports the same featureset most mobile versions of Messenger did and also supports push messaging (saves battery life considerably).
No, the best option is to change to Tencents QQ that among other things contain an almost full version of MSN Messenger. It also contains a Myspace, and a Facebook and a remote control (I forgot the original name) and many other things.
ne nous laisser pas tomber avec windows live messenger je l’utilise depuis 20 ans.S’il vous plait écrivez moi en français, je ne peux pas vous lire en anglais.Merci beaucoup
Bonsoir Jonathan,
Je reçois régulièrement vos mail, le problème c’est que vous ne m’écrivez pas en français donc difficulté pour moi de vous lire.
Je vous ai déjà signalé ce souci et je souhaiteriez que vous m’écriviez en français.
Je vous remercie par avance comptant sur votre compréhension.
Last year I was able to run MSN Messenger 7.5 on Windows 8.1 without using the Reviver, just by changing the compatibility to WIN2000 in the registry. Today I tried that trick but it no longer works so I switched to WLM 2012, but this version doesn’t show me anymore a list of my contacts under Options–>Privacy where I can find out who deleted me from their contacts list. Is there any other way to find out who removed me from their list?
I’m afraid even though you had access to that Privacy tab in the older version, that information was inaccurate as of 2011 as Microsoft did away with the old reverse/block/allow lists on the server-side when they released Messenger 2011. As such, some (not all) people who had upgraded to newer versions of Messenger since then would have appeared as have deleted you when they didn’t. Even if someone put in the work to make the older versions work again, this feature would still be inaccurate and the list would be meaningless.
Also if you’re wondering, the trick with compatibility only worked for certain accounts, as your account would have been redirected to a server (specifically the db3 ones) that was never updated to reject older versions of Windows at the time.
How on earth did you pull this off? I mean, didn’t MS shutdown all servers? Do you “simply” relay all the traffic to server that are still alive? This really brings back memories, I’d love to see this become popular again! Too bad we can’t use versions prior to 2012 anymore though 😦 If you ever need webhosting space or help in any other way, please let me know!
Man you’re awesome, thanks for this great messenger reviver 😀
Hey Jonathan. I send you an email asking for help with WLM, I hope you see it!
This is amazing and I am so grateful for it! I’ll donate to keep this running! Thank you SO MUCH
Jonathan, Great job man…..very thanks..!!
I really want 7.5 versión back again 😦