My friend had a strange connection problem recently resulting in error 800488fe while signing in using WLM 14.0.8117.0416. Usually such problems lasted for a day or two but this time problem was more persistent so I’ve attepmted to debug and workaround this issue. There seems to be an issue with bay.messengergeek.com causing the client to fail at challege-response stage. I’m using the same client version without problems but I’m using db3.messengergeek.com to connect. Simple redirection of bay to db3 using hosts file resolved the issue:
This leads to a simple conclusion that bay is misbehaving in some way. If you wish to see connection log, here it is: WLM Connection Log - Pastebin.com Things seem to get interesing after line 165. I hope this can be fixed permanently in the future.
The 800488fe error code indicates the account is blocked, the log shows it rejecting the credentials too. In most cases, visiting www.outlook.com with your Messenger credentials and following any steps shown during the Outlook.com signin process should fix it, officially anyway.
It’s difficult to trigger this security function on demand and it would be difficult to tell for sure regardless, but you may have managed to bypass this security feature by punting the connection to one of the db3 servers ( good job ). In this part of the sign-in process, Messenger connects to the main servers (in the recent versions of Reviver, that’s msn.messengergeek.com), and then you’re redirected to either bay, bn1 or db3 per what the initial Messenger server decides. If it fails connecting, it will try or transfer you to another server but it won’t in situations like this where the server has responded and rejected your login.
I think it’s definitely worth trying to fix this via the Outlook.com signin when you have a chance, although you can probably keep your hosts modification in place for the time being. In the future there could be some problems if that server is down (they do from time to time go into maintenance mode), the IP is reassigned (it’s happened once or twice in the past few months) or if that Messenger server starts trying to transfer you back to bay (in my accounts for example, it will transfer me immediately when trying to connect to db3 servers). Obviously, you/they can just remove or change the hosts if a problem arises though.
I didn’t mention it but that’s exactly what we’ve tried before messing with hosts. Signing into outlook with same credentials was successful, even web messenger session was working properly. Strange issue but at least this ugly workaround is still stable and working
). In this part of the sign-in process, Messenger connects to the main servers (in the recent versions of Reviver, that’s 
on the debugging/workaround work!