GW and MSN interfering with each other

A few months ago, I noticed a strange bug, one that apparently no one else seems to have encountered (I've tried googling, to no avail).

Basically, if I have GW and MSN open at the same time, they interfere with each other. In GW, I can't call anything while it's open. When I try to, nothing happens. No text in team chat, and no response from heroes. No target icon beside my name in the party list.

On the other hand, for reasons unknown to me, MSN eventually just closes, for no apparent reason. The amount of time it takes for it to close is very inconsistent; sometimes, I can have both running for at least 10-20 minutes without incident; sometimes it only takes a few minutes.

Anyway, (since I have Windows 7 64-bit) I have MSN pinned to my taskbar, and so it always displays at least one window: one is my display picture (closing that one immediately exits the program and logs me out), and the rest are whichever actual chat windows I have open.

When the bug strike, everything vanishes from my taskbar (except the pinned icon). However, the process is still running, which means that it won't allow me to open it again without terminating the previous process.


For obvious reasons, I can't provide any screenshots; it wouldn't be of any help.

I'm running this on a Dell Studio XPS laptop, with Windows 7 64-bit. I doubt it's a hardware problem, so I won't bother posting anymore details (until someone asks).

Thank you for your time/help.

run Gw as admin. Should go away. Belongs in tech section btw.

Sorry, didn't notice the tech section. I saw "bug" and immediately went with that.

Anyway, running as an admin did not work. I tried going into a zone and calling a target there, but after hitting the spacebar a few times, it closed MSN.

I should also mention that I play in windowed mode, since it's a lot more convenient when I'm doing something other than just playing the game (which is 99% of the time).

Is your msn modded?

Specifically with the Messenger plus add on?

Emphasis mine. Do you mean that every other program in your task bar, unrelated to GW and MSN, also vanishes?

If so, two programs crashing shouldn't interfere with anything outside of those programs unless they're going very nuts, which you'd notice as a global slowdown. If not, nevermind.

Yes, I do have the Messenger Plus addon.

And I guess I should've been a bit more specific. It's only MSN that's affected; everything else works just fine. It basically just closes MSN down, with the exception of the process itself.

go into the plus preferences-> in the messenger tab on the top->hit messenger lock on the left->uncheck the box next to :"Activate Messenger Lock with a system-wide shortcut"

it's defaulted to ctrl+space and will override your gw commands.

That did it. Thank you very much.

I wasn't aware of that (stupid) feature. It seems to be working properly now.

It's useful at work and when you don't trust your college roommate. Otherwise it does become annoying very quick.

I got the same problem, and is running the same version of windows on the same kinda laptop :O

But i dont use MSN Plus add-on

I don't use MSN, so I can't give a definite answer, but the obvious thing to check is if MSN uses the CTRL key (alone or in combo) for any other functions beyond just the lock, and either disable them or assign a different key combo.
Or you could "just say no to MSNs"

i have msn plus and gw running at the same time no problem at all so must be something with your computer