These two weeks were just tediuous. I suddenly lost all my contacts on Windows Live Messenger for no reason. So I had to struggle for few days just to figure out the source of the problem.

Of course, Struggling included uninstalling/installing the same version of Windows Live Messenger as well as the new 2009 beta version.

And my struggling efforts didn’t go in vain. It seemed there was a synchronization problem, which was resolved by clearing the contact cache on my machine.

After few hours of satisfaction since my contacts were back :), I noticed that I couldn’t see the Display names of my contacts. All what you could see was the emails of the people. And believe me it is really annoying when you have emails such as acd123@live.com or something like that.

Again, some struggling with the different view options of contacts, but this time, it wasn’t good at all. Microsoft support failed to resolve this issue although they were really helpful, and I was astonished with their fast and detailed replies.

And resolving such issues needs a bit of inspiration. So by mistake, I tried to edit the contact details where you could edit the nickname of the corresponding contacts.
And for no reason, I had the nicknames for all of my contacts set.

Trial and errors works pretty good sometimes, and deleting the nicknames which were already set RESOLVED my issue.
But the question remains, WHO SET THESE NICKNAMES???

Filed under: TROUBLESHOOTING