This problem is driving me round the bend. Google failed me and so I thought I'd revisit a (very) old haunt to find some real answers.

I'm trying to download Windows Live Messenger because all my hip friends on the interwebs say that they're using lots of pretty colours and sounds and it makes me jealous. =/

I use Firefox 3 for my general browsing, but have Internet Explorer as a backup in case anything isn't compatible. I've tried downloading the program in both, and while this page loads properly, when I click on 'Download', the next page (image 1) either only displays for barely a second before redirecting to an error page (image 2).
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/619...rntscrnub9.jpg
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/960...rntscrngn6.jpg

Believing this to be probably just an incompatibilty with Firefox I tried the same site on my barely-used Internet Explorer browser, only to be greeted with the same symptoms; a brief display of the aformentioned screen, followed by a general 'Could not display' message from IE:
http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/5...scrnpz9.th.jpg

So, I'm stumped. Any light shed on the situation would be greatly appreciated and quite possibly rewarded with virtual cookies.

sounds like a network issue to me. how is your network configured? if this is on a large network (e.g. work, school) the download could be blocked.

Nope, this is a personal laptop, connected to a BT wireless home hub. I've also just recieved some very useful information from another very trusted site that I may have a particularly nasty virus - that could go some way towards explaining all this (I've also been unable to download virus-scan updates on practically everything, had my computer crash while seemingly doing nothing intensive several times in a short period, and many other symptoms).

But that's a job for another section of the forums.

Its seems like a network problem something is blocking the download check your network config