Windows Live Messenger Locks Computer Up

For the past two days I have not been able to sign onto the Messenger. When I try, it will show the spinning blue green people and *sometimes* like it is trying to connect. And then 1 of 2 things will happen:

If I do nothing at all, it will continue trying to connect and then the blue green people will slow down and the Messenger window will stop responding. Soon after that all my other programs that I have will likewise stop responding. This includes Mozilla Firefox. I can't CTRL+ALT+DELETE - I have to do a hard reboot.

I tell it do cancel signing off. It will say "Signing off" but then do everything the above does only much faster.

I've tried the troubleshooting tactics it recommends in Help including turning off the firewall (which was never a problem). It has worked fine for over a year now. It just suddenly stopped working two days ago.

It is possible for me to log onto my hotmail and my live account on the Internet.

I think that there are several choices. I would just use a system restore, from before the problem.

If you choose not to go that route you can use revo and ccleaner to uninstall and clean up the remnants and then reinstall. You would want to make a system restore point first, in case of problems.

http://www.revouninstaller.com/
http://www.ccleaner.com/

Messenger is probably located in the Conrol panel >programs and Live Essentials