Firewalls. They seem to be everywhere! They protect you which is a great thing, and they also keep you out of places which the network administrators do not want you. One of these things is MSN, or other popular messengers such as AIM or Yahoo. The best way to get around this is to use a standard port (hint: such as 80) for your instant messaging needs. How do you do that? Enter Meebo, a web browser based instant messaging client which supports MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber. Excellent. The best part of all is that is works wonderfully. Do yourself a favor and check it out. Even if you have MSN, and can use it freely on your network, give it a shot. You may find that using one screen for all IM clients is better than having them all run independently on your machine. Obviously there are other applications for that such as Trillian, but hey, I like Meebo! Check it out at: http://wwwm.meebo.com/