after stracing pidgin, I found out a damaged ~/.gnome2/nautilus- sendto/pidgin_buddies_online file was reported as "stale NFS file handle" - I never used nfs on this machine.
A fsck of my /home partition made the damaged file -- and the suspected bug -- go away, pidgin works. excuses for having wasted anyones time on this one. ** Changed in: pidgin (Ubuntu) Status: New => Invalid -- pidgin crashes at xmpp logon https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/318709 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs