I am also on Hotmail and used the beta Outlook before it was officially converted over recently, and haven't had any major problems except for losing access one day, getting "password invalid" msg and then found that it was forcing me to change my password after 72 days, and it appeared that I lost my contacts but after poking around I found there was a setting that I had to adjust which must be a new "feature".
Jojo: MicroSoft recently converted Hotmail users to Outlook.com which is a totally separate and distinct product from Outlook which is part of MS Office suite...go figure, very confusing with same names yet totally different products. Here is quick info:
What's different between Outlook.com and Outlook? - Microsoft Windows