I am investigating an annoying situation with live.com for a friend.

When I try to login to a live.com email account with IE 7/8 it fails with a
"server is down.. try later." message.  The same login attempt
works perfectly fine with FF.  But my friend wants to stick with IE.

I rolled back from IE8 to IE7, same problem.

I checked Tools/InternetOptions/Security.. and nothing is blocked.

The only thing I haven't done yet is scrutinize the settings in Avast, but
the Avast installation is certainly set to default. And.. using FF to
access the same live.com service works fine.

Back to IE..  I can reach the live.com login panel.  After I enter the
email password there is an extremely long period before the error message
"..try again later" appears. The status bar reveals a lot of
activity as as IE tries to log in.  The status bar changes from live.com,
to mail.live.com, then to something like "comhms.118382.live.com"
and so on.. but then ultimately settles down to the error MS error message
mentioned above.

Anyone experience anything similar to this? I'm looking for a solution.

--- Thunderbird 2.0.0.24 (Windows/20100228)