I've tried that already.

When I click "Close account" it tells me I have a subscription or a Windows Live Hotmail account open and I need to cancel them first.

When I view my subscriptions the only one I have is canceled. The thing I am trying to close IS my Hotmail account so I don't know what I can do from here.

The stupid ***@£&^& system seems intent on not allowing me to delete my account/

Hotmail decides to log me out every so often of it's own accord, which strangely can be fixed by refreshing the page

It also can be desperately slow to load the next email, but then Gmail is that way too now at this end...

I have a Yahoo account and they allow the creation of temp accounts linked to your main one. That way I create a set of temp account ( named Temp1 Temp 2 etc) and when they get to spammy I just delete them and move on to the next. That way I can keep my main account reasonably free of spam while still being able to sign up to web sites that insist on you creating an account when you know you will probably never visit them again

I do use hotmail but it's primarily for spam filtering as other have said earlier in the thread.
Only ever seem to get a few spams a day in my junk mail folder and a fair few are from online shops and things that I've used once or twice in the past.