WLM hanging in Vista MVL

So I was lucky enough to get a copy of Vista through a VL. After installing
WLM (both 8.0 final and 8.1 beta) I am unable to bring up the WLM window, the
tray icon is there but clicking/right clicking does absolutely nothing.
Hovering mouse over the task icon displays the standard "Windows Live
Messenger BETA -Not signed in."

So here’s the crazy part. I can't kill the msnmsgr.exe process for the life
of me! Not with the task manager or with taskkill. Taskkill reports that it
successfully forced a kill for the PID but it remains running!

Only way to kill the process is to do a cold reboot since otherwise the
shutdown process would hang.

I have tried everything from installing various point and beta versions of
the flash player and activex and disabling UAC.