This is something that really annoys. It's very annoying seeing a contact on MSN Messenger come on, only to see them go right offline seconds later.

This is of course because Outlook express and several others Microsoft programs like to activate MSN Messnger when you run them. Some of them have the feature to turn it off so MSN Messenger won't activate when the program is run, but sadly those options don't always work.

Anyone else have this problem with their contacts
?

I hate to suggest this, but perhaps your contacts are signing on, see that there's no one they particularly want to talk to and either sign off right away, or switch to "appear offline".

Actually, what's going on is that when they log on, they do so but have it set to appear offline. MSN Messenger isn't smart enough to log in and appear offline without first showing up as logging in.