XMPP Rejecting PLAIN, "No worthy mechs found" Red Hat 5.5

[Alan De Smet]

Thank you for all of the help!  This proved the key clue:

Paul Aurich <darkrain42 at pidgin.im> wrote:
> Are you sure you don't have an architecture mismatch between the pidgin
> rpm and the cyrus-sasl-plain package you have installed?
> 
> I'm by no means a RPM expert, but this does look like the sasl plugin is
> missing.  Hopefully someone who's knowledgable about yum, rpm, and
> RedHat's multiarch will jump in here. :)

I checked which libraries were being loaded with strace and
discovered an unexpected directory being checked.  Some unusual
software I need to use really wants to pollute my environment
with a custom LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LIBPATH, and SASL_PATH.  Removing
them fixed the problem right up.

Thank you again!

-- 
Alan De Smet                              Condor Project Research
adesmet at cs.wisc.edu                http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/