The pecan plugin fixed it. Thanks, all.
The Pidgin developer site is down, so I could not check to see what they're doing with the issue, though. Will check in later.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but with the pecan plugin, nothing shows up in pidgin - I extracted the tar, ran make && sudo make install; no errors, and libmsn-pecan.so shows up in /usr/lib/purple-2/, but no wln protocol, and nothing in plugins....

pidgin version is 2.5.2

thx

resolved, fixed, working with 'pecan patch' on Win Xp
 

"disconnected Unable to retrieve MSN Address Book"

Working, solved, fixed, patch, pecan Win Xp

disconnected Unable to retrieve MSN Address Book

pidgin, adium, trillian


lots of key words above in the hope that it helps others...

to fix;

downloaded the pecan fix and installed.

using Win Xp Sp3, pidgin 2.5.2
Using pidgin [simultaneously] for; 2x MSN, 2x Yahoo, 3x Googletalk, 2x QQ and Skype plugin.

note it did not seem to work immediately, so I left it for a few hours before attempting login.

works with more than one MSN account at the same time.

Thank you to a great community for finding a way to 'fix' this. and damn M$ for creating a problem for tens of thousands of people.....

Simon, Jiangsu, China. [www.aquatooth.com]

may NOT have fixed it in fact...
 

Checking things I logged onto pidgin on another Win Xp box and it worked WITHOUT the pecan fix.... Seems M$N might have fixed whatever issue they caused for all of us...

Now working here with the MSN protocol as well. Pidgin 2.5.3

New pidgin version 2.5.4 is out(here) . Among other changes:
MSN

* Change Contact Server to temporarily fix connection problems.

Windows-specific changes

* Fix the "Hang on Exit" issue that a number of users encountered.

Quite fast response from pidgin team.