Yahoo! Messenger Doesn't Login? Check IE Proxy Settings

The other day, I wasn't able to login to Yahoo! Messenger on my company laptop. I fiddled around a bit and finally realized that I had the company proxy set in Internet Explorer. Once I cleared that, everything worked fine.

Yahoo! Messenger has connection options for -

• No proxies
• Use proxies
• No network detection

But it seems that even if you choose 'No proxies', the option doesn't override the proxy set in IE. Not very obvious and a potential blocker. Firefox does not cause this problem.