Intermittent connection problems

[Dean Mazur]

I may have solved it, with some help from Pidgin history.

I found something around 3 years old related to how Pidgin gets user information from the server, one time only on initial connect, and that if a GTalk user changes their nickname, Pidgin won't know about it.  The workaround is to delete the Buddy and recreate it, then use "Get user info" instead of defining an alias.

Strangely, Pidgin doesn't retrieve the user info for the local account, just the Buddy.  So, if you want to see a short name instead of the full account name during the chat, a local alias is a solution.  Same comment appears to apply to the local photo definition, which isn't retrieved from the server for the local account, just for the Buddy.

Once I had my wife change her Google Profile to match her nickname, things stabilized.  All computers running Pidgin seem to be working now.

Without getting into the code, I can only comment that there are some aspects of Pidgin that seem to be "one-way", meaning there isn't any easy way to back out, start over, and do it right if you make a mistake.

Well, there's always deleting %appdata%\.purple I suppose.
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