Thankyou for your responses but I have solved the problem. It appears to be the the DDEserver. MSN6 requires the full DDEServer to be used and not the DDEService. This option was easily changed in one of the litestep .rc files in the /personal/ dir, I think.

I hope this information can help others who want to use MSN6 with LiteStep :) Incidentally, I now have trillian as well and I do like it.. but I like being able to add my own emoticons (as done in MSN6) more.

Thankyou for your help, g'bye for now.