How to recover a Microsoft Account?

Hello,

When the consumer version of Outlook first came out, I rushed to get a "nice" looking email address. I registered successfully, and subsequently forgot about the account for a while. I never changed the password from the one I originally registered with.

With Windows 8 having the single sign-on thing, I wanted to use my fresh new Outlook account for this, but found that my password is incorrect. Putting aside the fact that MS has either done something stupid to my account, or they've allowed a social engineer to hack my account, I'm wondering how I recover my account. I have already tried the automated ways.

Account recovery will not send any emails to the secondary email address I used with the registration, and the account is too bare to provide any meaningful information to convince the automated account checker that I'm genuine.

Has anybody else had this much trouble from MS accounts? Is there a phone line I can call to try and recover the account? What kind of ways can I prove my genuineness?

Thanks