After I finished solving the Show My Webcam problem on Windows Live Messenger 2009 yesterday, I wanted to do a topic on McAfee SiteAdvisor. So I downloaded the latest McAfee SiteAdvisor, installed it and bam, my webcam stopped working again. This time I got the message “We couldn’t start your camera device. Please check that your camera is not currently in use by another program, and then try again.” when I tried to show my webcam. I am very sure that my webcam is not being used by any other software. Then when being invited to start sending webcam, I got the error “Messenger is not available right now. Please try again later. (0x8ac70202) or (0x8AC70013) after accepting the invitation.
I didn’t spend too much time solving this problem because I immediately knew that it is surely caused by McAfee SiteAdvisor since the problem started after I installed SiteAdvisor. If you have both McAfee SiteAdvisor and Windows Live Messenger 2009 installed, please take the following actions until a patch is out from McAfee because there are some incompatibility problems.
The workaround is pretty simple. All you need to do is to disable McAfee SiteAdvisor from monitoring msnmgr.exe but there is no option to do that. You’ll have to manually go to C:\Program Files\McAfee\SiteAdvisor\ and look for the file sasets.ini. Open the sasets.ini with notepad or your favorite text editor, locate the section titled [msnmsgr.exe] and change the value to 0 (1 means enable and 0 means disable). Refer to the image below for a clearer explanation.
Save the file and close it. You can either restart your computer for changes to take effect OR simply terminate and reopen Windows Live Messenger 2009. Yeah it’s frustrating that Windows Live Messenger 2009 has so many bugs and incompatibilities but no worries, I’ll slowly help you all to look for solutions and workarounds to make it work rather than downgrading back to MSN 8.5. According to Wikipedia, Windows Live Messenger is no longer beta and the latest version is Build 14.0.8064.206 released on 12 February 2009. You can head on to http://messenger.live.com/ to download the latest Live installer (wlsetup-custom.exe) which can automatically update your Messenger if it detected there’s an update.