MSN hotmail doing strange things

[AlanYork]

Though at present it seems to be ok, hotmail seems to be behaving rather oddly. I signed in today and it told me, that as a antispam measure and to make sure I was not an autoresponder, I had to type the sequence of letters and numbers that I saw in the box it presented me with and hit CONTINUE ...ok, fair enough, I did.

Then it asked me to do it again....and again...and again.....it just wasnt seeing it...why the hell not??????

Eventually I asked my friend to login and do it for me on his pc and he did it first time, problem solved.

To make things even stranger, the email from MSN (I accessed it from Outlook, which I dont normally use) that I got to explain what was going on, disappeared totally from my inbox when my friend logged in as me and completed their wretched form. Even more bizarrely, the aforesaid e mail directed me to a link that would supposedly "help". It was MSNs home page with no instructions whatsoever!!!

Then the newsletters I get from various sources arrived...no pics, just red crosses in empty boxes...wait a while and that clears itself up.......!

Is it me but do MSN sites, eg Messenger, hotmail etc just start doing really odd things for no apparent reason whatsoever? A fair while back, again for no good reason that I could see, I used to get error 404 whenever I accessed hotmail...then, out of the blue, its all ok again.

What do you think?, Is MSN becoming unreliable? It's pointless e mailing them, I find their tech support just sends you a set list of things to try and if that dont work they just say "contact your ISP". NTL then say "not our problem mate, its MSN" and round and round we go. Is MSN hotmail rubbish? Is it unstable or am I just unlucky with it? Am I the only one who encounters these difficulties?