A user came into #ubuntu-beginners today with this issue. It was resolved with the following:
Normally Empathy uses NetworkManager to determine whether you're connected to a network, and won't connect or allow status changes if you're not. When not using NetworkManger you can disable this by: /apps/empathy/use_conn. gconftool-2 --set --type=boolean /apps/empathy/use_conn false
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