MSN Messenger - v7.0 and Plus!

Gosh, I'm just full of blogs today :-)

I use MSN Messenger quite a bit, and I recently installed the Plus! plugin, which is quite nice. I especially like the notifications feature - you can choose to be notified when any of your contacts changes their status in any way (it's all customizable, based on contact and status). It's a lot more useful than the default messenger options, which will notify you when someone logs in but not when they log off, change their status to away, or change their status back to online. And the other cool feature is that you can show contacts on your desktop, so you can easily see their status and send them a message (or e-mail, or whatever); you can set whether it will always stay on top of any other apps, and you can set the transparency, and all sorts of cool things.

I actually installed the beta version of version 7.0, but I wasn't terribly impressed. The main contacts window is very cluttered, and though it adds some cool things, there's not much extra functionality that I'd actually use. It seemed as though it would be useful to be able to see the status of my contacts before I sign in (or at least, before they can see that I've signed in), but then I realised that I sign in automatically when messenger starts, and messenger starts automatically when windows boots, so it's not actually terribly useful to me. And it doesn't work with Plus! (at least, not yet), so I decided I'd rather have the old version and Plus! than the new version. Of course, uninstalling it then uninstalls the old version too (it's an uninstall, after all, not a "revert to previous version), so then I had to go back and reinstall 6.2, or whatever it is that I'm using.

Oh, and Plus! lets you do cool things like rename your contacts, and it has some extra emoticons and a useful emoticon panel, and stuff like that.

But there's one feature that I'd really like and I haven't been able to find (not that I've been looking terribly hard, to be honest) - I'd like to know, when a contact's status is set to "away", whether they've set it manually or whether it got set by default because there hasn't been any activity on their machine for x number of minutes (and similarly for "busy", although that one's not as important).

So is there a plugin there that can do that? Are there any other really cool (and useful) plugins I should know about? Leave a comment and tell me your favourite!