Thanks for the Trillian suggestion, but this is no good to me because I don't use any other instant messenger than MSN. (because none of my contacts do, so there really isn't much point to)

It looks like the only thing I can do is wait and hope the MS programmers will get their head out of their <censored> and start doing some decent programming.

Of course, I've been wishing that for years now...*sigh*