Thanks for the info. Just for the sake of understanding it better, I
assume even Live or Skype, even when making a "direct" connection,
must at least touch base with their servers to keep track of who's
available, and sort of a DNS service so the attempt at a direct
connection has some IP address to try to connect to. I haven't needed
to do this before and I'm kind of surprised with all the media
abilities built-in anymore that there isn't a simple direct way.
Imagine if you had two PCs at the far ends of a big building that
aren't even on internet. You would think they could connect this way.
Or is that where the old Win messenger would have come it? It operates
by user name but maybe it does its own local management of user names
on a LAN rather than using an outside server for that?

Some of the older network systems (Novell and such) used to have a
util to send pop-up messages to others on your LAN using the PC
network names as designation. I guess I imagined there would be
something like that but modernized with video/audio. Maybe if Win
messenger is doing its own in-house user name management it sort of is
doing that. Of course it's also discontinued now.

Thanks,
Tom


On Jul 4, 9:46 pm, "Jonathan Kay [MVP]"
<msnewsrepl...@jonathankay.com> wrote:
> Greetings Tom,
>
> Windows Messenger and Windows Live Messenger will both try a direct connection first. If