Miranda: Do I really need ICQ et al to get on MSN?

I gave this a try today as an alternative to Pidgin, to see what all the fuss was about. It kind of threw me a curve ball asking for my AIM info. OK, I put it in, but then it asked me for ICQ. Don't have it, so I hit Cancel. Now all the status icons on the bottom are black and I can't even put my MSN info in.

I figured out that if I right-click on the systray icon and go to Options I can enter the info manually, but I still can't connect to anything.

Do I really need to configure all networks for it to connect just to one?

//edit: Removed the stuff about Pidgin - that problem was something else.