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IM troubles

Yesterday, Trillian stopped working for me. It would start up, then immediately crash. I was able to temporarily resolve the problem by disabling the auto-connect feature (while the friendly Windows “This Program Is Now Crashing” window was up, Trillian still responded to commands). This stopped the program from crash. However, it was no way for a program that was supposed to make my life easier to behave. And, since Ceurellian Studios sold us subscribers out and didn’t give a discount for Trillian 3, I had decided that my next move would be to Gaim.

I had tried Gaim on several months earlier, and while it worked fine, I found the user interface extremely unrefined. My Trillian skin of choice, Beacon2, is very small, with very little overhead, with the online portion of my large contact list usually fitting entirely on one screen. In Gaim, only perhaps 15 contacts fit on a single page, and the concessions to allow a tabbed interface add so much bulk to windows that there is little room left over for conversation. I found all of this extremely displeasing. However, it had worked, so yesterday, I decided it was worth a larger investment of my time. And there was always the possibility that I would find a skin that fitted my fancy.

However, it was not to be. I installed the latest version of Gaim, but I have yet to see it run. In fact, when I try to run it, apparently nothing happens. No error message; no window of any sort, in fact. A small amount of Googling led to a few leads, but all were dead ends. In short, I have no idea what is going on, and no idea what to do to begin to find a fix.

Any help would be appreciated.

2 Responses to “IM troubles”

  1. Bernie Zimmermann Says:

    When in doubt, roll back ;)

    That site seems to be down tonight, but hopefully it will be back up soon because I always go there to escape from software “upgrades” that actually degrade.

  2. Dan Moretti Says:

    Dll hell is what did that to me. There’s some DLL that you can delete in your GAIM folder (used in previous Gaim versions), this resolves the problems. Damn, I can’t remember what DLL it is… But I think I found that out using the Gaim website.

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