i recently updated my yahoo messenger to 8.1 and i noticed last week that i could no longer connect using my office box.  i asked our network admin to take a look at it and he told me that there were problematic updates on the latest version of yahoo messenger so he rolled it back to version 5.x. 

The old version was dead slow and I couldn't resist why ym works on my laptop (having version 8.1) and not on my office desktop machine.

i finally had the time to take a look at it this morning and the first thing i looked up were the ym logs.  good to find that ym maintains one, here are what i got:

2007/03/12 09:57:25.963[THRD:2972] [FT60] Error - HttpSendRequest failed:12029, Source = messenger/prefs
2007/03/12 09:57:25.963[THRD:2168] [FT60] Error - HttpSendRequest failed:12029, Source = ycontent/?&getgp=0&intl=sg&os=win&ver=8.1.0.239
2007/03/12 09:57:37.963[THRD:2424] [CLT] Error - CYMH::OnGetToken() Reg Server Down 1.

When i searched for the OnGetToken string, i found a yahoo messenger post here, which was resolved when i downloaded and installed the latest microsoft updates.  Turns out that my automatic updates on my work pc is no longer working since i found a number of error logs in my event log (Unable to Connect: Windows is unable to connect to the automatic updates service and therefore cannot download and install updates according to the set schedule. Windows will continue to try to establish a connection.).