My Hotmail account is refusing to log on to my xbox

ok. so I've added my sons gmail account as an alias. if I make the gmail primary how does that effect the Hotmail account & how I log in to my laptops? can he log in to his xbox with the gmail (& see his gamertag & profile) & can I log in to my devices
with the Hotmail address?

I can log into my Hotmail and my Xbox account all the time? I am doing so right now.

I logged in with the email to which I get my Xbox notifications. It's a hotmail account. R u suggesting that I should b using a live email, as I'm not sure I have one, as I've always used hotmail to log in whenever given the opportunity.

okay. let's try this here since i can't seem to get the post to work any other way. i have a new WP7 phone. i want to use my hotmail as my primary WLID and unify my accounts. i originally made my xbox account with my gmail. i logged into my old hotmail today.
i then went into the xbox settings to change the xbox accoutn association and got rejected--it says there's an xbox account associated with my hotmail (i don't remember setting this up, and in fact didn't have an xbox when i last used the account) is there
a way to transfer the xbox accoutn from gmail association to hotmail association? or am i better off making my gmail my primary WLID?

Hi,

my assumption is, that if the Xbox Live Account is used, the Microsoft Account it is based on (Hotmail/OutLook etc) is also seen as used, which would mean that the account is seen as active.

But a Hotmail email account wouldn't be seen as active unless you physically logged into the email account to check messages?...unless using the Microsoft account automatically logs you into your Hotmail account..but then you'd still need to physically open the Hotmail email (through whatever medium is used to access messages) to show the system it is active I would have thought