Getting a message saying "You must install the newer version in order to continue" but refuse to upgrade? Here's a neat little trick I found on a spanish board of the same topic. But a few things I figured out for myself, as the orginal instructions were to run the program in compatability mode with Windows 2000. unfortunately this also removed the use of MSN plus and my lovely skin. fortunately i figured out that setting it to run with Windows Server 2003 allowed the usage of msn plus as well

I'm using Vista so sorry to those of whom are using XP and run into problems with these instructions.

1. Right click on the msnmsgr.exe and select properties (it's probably under "Program Files > Windows Live > Messenger", anything older and it should be in "Program Files > MSN Messeger")
2. Select the "Compatability" and check the box "Run this program in compatability mode for:"
3. Choose "Windows Server 2003", (if you don't have this choice simply choose "Windows 2000")
4. Enjoy

You're all very welcome ^^

8.5 Final isn't seeing required update notices. I know the old Betas do however. You can go in with reshack and change the Versioninfo string to 14.0.8064 as well.

That's because i'm using 8.5 beta, but it works for anything below it as well. ^^
It's just that the skins I was using have yet to be updated with the new Live and Live plus. I'm sure other people would have thier own reasons for not wanting to update, such as only wanting to use Messenger 7 instead of moving to Live.

I downgraded back to 8.5.
Although I find it extremely annoying that the stupid questions keeps popping up every minute - "do you want to upgrade?" etc. Not to mention the message is in my Messenger window all the time, right above the contact list...

Okay. I found somewhat of a fix for this. And it does work. I had only gotten the odd popup ONCE since.

1. Add the following to your hosts file: 127.0.0.1 msgr.dlservice.microsoft.com
This will stop it downloading the new WLM in the background. (Once it gets the file completely downloaded, it will begin nagging)

2. Delete wlmsetup-cvr.exe from your temp folder (/Documents and settings/username/local settings/temp) (you could also use cleanmgr and clean things up while you're there)

The reshack version fix is optional at this point, but if you do this, save the fixed EXE as something else (msnmsgr-patched.exe) So you can swap it in the event of a forced upgrade.