@glyph here's the question I would ask. I've recently had similar frustrations with the simple act of logging into hotmail. it is now a process which on my phone, takes me through nine different web pages every single time I try to log on. I would chalk it up to garden variety incompetence, if at every step it didn't say some variation of "this would be easier if you gave us more of your personal information!"
did you get a lot of that? or was it all normal screw-ups?