Turns out that the problem of not connecting seems to be related to an update they did to the servers that requires users (and this appears to be true for users of MS's acutal MSN program) to be fully patched to login.
When I searched for the error message number that I was getting I found that they're looking into finding out what it is that is actually causeing the problem, but the fix is to upgrade to IE 6.0 and/or get all the latest security patches for windows.
The problem here for me is that I don't have IE on my system anymore, not the full product anyway. I've kept around a few of the old DLLs for things like the help system, YIM, etc. so they'll continue to work. Frankly I'm not loading that beast on my system.
The problem also seems to come into play with Win95 users (since 95 is now on MS's dead OS list), they can't patch their windows at all.
The reasoning behind this is that it forces people to do the patches and upgrades so that most or all of the hijacking and such can't go on with their system.
It does however kill off my accessing MSN unless they can patch Trillian to work around this problem.
Heads-up to all.
