MSN Messenger shows all contacts in "struck out"

Question

My Wife's XP Home netbook shows all her MSN messenger contacts with their images struck through with a red line. She is unable to send messages with it. As far as I can tell the connection is ok, she appears to be online. In fact its possible to tell which of the MSN contacts are currently online so clearly some form of connection is present.

From my own machine she appears to be offline.

Apart from the red line through the contact image and the fact that send message function is missing everything else appears normal.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Answer 1

It turned out that I had to go through each contact, block each of them then unblock them.

Answer 2

By some odd chance (pure shot-in-the-dark here), do the struck-through contacts have somehow ended up on her block list? That's what it sounds like to me, at least.