Ok, this is something that has been bugging me for a while now, I just haven't had the time to address it in detail. Now, anyone who has used WLM 8.0 for any extended period of time knows it pretty much stinks. It's not stable, disconnects randomly and fubars your contact list out of the blue. Now one would think that things would get better with WLM 8.1 right? WRONG! The beta builds of WLM 8.1 thus far have been absolute crap. It crashes if you even look at it the wrong way let alone trying to do anything. One of the big issues with it is the pure joke that they claim it has "better Vista support". Well in WLM 8.0 on Vista it will crash silently on exit, well it doesn't crash on exit in 8.1 but that's about the only time it doesn't crash! Whatever WLM is doing, it seems to be interfering with DEP in Vista when it tries to parse anything that uses Flash. So the workaround is to disable DEP, but seriously Microsoft. This piece of garbage can't even play nicely with one of your critical security technologies? IMO these current builds of WLM 8.1 should have never seen the light of day. WLM as a whole is becoming an utter joke, and you know it's really sad when most Microsoft employees do not use it because they admit that it crashes so much that it interferes with their day to day work (this is both 8.0 and 8.1 btw).
Anyway, I just had to get that off my chest, because I really think the WLM team needs some devs and testers who know what they're doing, because at this point I'm starting to think I could train a monkey to write a more stable IM client.