MSN Connection Issue (Error code 0x80072efd) Resolution

My brother made an interesting discovery tonight. His copy of MSN could not connect to the server and came up with the EXTREMELY generic error "Could not connect you to MSN blah blah ... Error code 0x80072efd". Googling this error is completely useless because its the kind of error that 1 million noobs encounter and post solutions like "is your firewall off" ... that kind of thing. Turns out the issue in his case was very simple - the date on the computer was set to December last year. Once this was changed to the correct date/time, MSN connected fine! We changed it back to a dodgy date just to verify that this is indeed what fixed the issue.

Seems that Live Messenger does not let you connect unless the date/time is somewhat sane, which is perfectly acceptable. What is not acceptable is the terrible error message.