Close my hotmail account

My Hotmail account was hacked about a year ago so I tried numerous times to close it but eventually gave up.  I was informed by friends that they were still receiving spam messages from me so obviously I need to resolve this issue.  I tried Deactivating my account and then closing it, but somehow I can still get in it and the "hacker" tried to change my password again so I had to recover it and change it yet again.  Please help me and let me know how I can go about closing this account, this is quite frustrating that after a year, I still cannot close a compromised account.