Spoiler, none of the versions of MSN that was on Escargot’s site worked on ReactOS.

Woah, that setup was fast.

No, seriously, it took like 3 minutes for me to set ReactOS all up. Or it would’ve, if it didn’t freeze while booting the second time around. It did boot properly when I chose the Debug option at startup time though, and afterwards through the default option. Weird.

ReactOS prompted to install a couple drivers for networking and audio, but it couldn’t find any. I searched online and found that I needed to set the networking card to PCnet-FAST III. I set the card to that and networking worked fine.

I went to install Firefox from the applications manager because it didn’t come with a browser. (probably to keep the download size small, and my 1.5 mbps connection and I appreciate that!) While Firefox was downloading, I messed around in Paint a bit.

Firefox was downloaded, and when I opened it it asked to import Internet Explorer data, heh. The control box wouldn’t display, so that was kind of weird.

So here comes the part you’ve all been waiting for: actually installing MSN. I went to Escargot’s site and downloaded the pre-patched 7.5.0324 installer. And…

It didn’t work. I was unable to sign in because the textboxes were broken. May be a font issue. I’d hate to end it here though, so I kept trying and going through each of the versions on the Escargot website. To avoid issues, I decided to go from oldest to newest, from 5.0 to 7.0.

To get rid of 7.5 I used Jonathan Kay’s ZapMessenger, which worked well after I installed 7-Zip (to open the archive) and .NET Framework 2.0. I installed 5.0.0575, but when signing in it gave me this error:

I didn’t get any option to log the connection, so I can’t pinpoint what the exact problem was. But I moved onward, to 6.2.0208. It kept my login information from 5.0.0575. It gave me pretty much the same error, but with an error code of 0x80004005 this time.

I tried a couple more times, getting the same error code. That brings us to 7.0.0820, which again saved my login info from 5.0 and 6.2. Guess what, yep, another error, with the error code of 800701f4. The second time the code was 80072efe.

I then tried again with logging enabled, but the log file still had nothing but the default comment saying “this has personal information, blah blah.”

Update (8:00 PM): As part of a complete coincidence, the Escargot server was down when I ran these tests originally. I’ve tried 7.0.0820 again and it did login, but fonts and profile pictures are kind of messed up:

I decided to try 7.5.0324 again because my login info was saved, and I wasn’t able to enter that info in that version the first time. Unfortunately, that info wasn’t carried over when I installed 7.5 again.

I’ve tried these same versions on WINE with similar results, so I think it’s safe to say that it’s not possible in the time being to run MSN Messenger on ReactOS or through WINE.

It was a fluke!

When I installed Windows 7 on Parallels, it was an OEM System Builder license. This is why moving it around from Parallels to VMware to VirtualBox upset Windows Activation; you’re only allowed to use that license on the first “motherboard” you install it on, in this case the virtual motherboard Parallels gave the virtual machine.

I’ll look into other options for running MSN. First of which being to try installing it into a ReactOS VM. All the versions of MSN I’ve tried won’t work in Wine, so I’m skeptical.

Apparently, loading up my vmdk file worked without a hitch. Booorriing. Last time I tried to load it in VirtualBox Windows Activation locked the entire VM unless I used another key or switched back to VMware, but apparently that wasn’t the case this time around.

So yeah I can use MSN again, woo!

Add me as a contact: c/o\o/l\t/i\l/e\@/s\d/f\./o\r/g

This is my new blog now, pretty cool huh?

About Escargot/MSN, I haven’t been able to go online because I haven’t set up my virtual machines up again since reinstalling macOS. Previously I’ve been using Ubuntu as a stick-it-to-the-man sort of thing, using VMware Player for my virtual machines. However, I went back to macOS and VMware Player isn’t available, so in order to use my virtual machines I’d need VMware Fusion or risk making Windows’ activation unhappy by using VirtualBox.. We’ll see how that goes.