Hi,
I am not too knowledgeable about this, but isnt ' GAIM ' something that is like ' Trillian ' (or something similar to that name) ? This is to say that Gaim by itself is not a Chat client but it is something that allows us to use multiple chat clients like AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC and all that good stuff. I say this ( I admit that I sure can be mistaken) because long time ago I used Trillian to chat in Yahoo, and MSN Messenger. So installing Trillian allows one to get into other Chats that are supported in it. I think that when you uninstall Trillian, ( GAIM , here) the stored information, ( if GAIM saves it) should be within the files created by the specific Chat that you used.