I am using OS 2008 RTCOMM (beta I believe) but this should also apply to the vanilla built in IM client. I don't know if anyone else noticed this problem , but I did and found a solution to boot.

My problem:
1. The IM client starts off as auto away, even when I set my presence status when connected to on and my auto-away as off. The presence indicator will light up green, but I am actually set to away. I try and IM a friend and always that under my name there is the yellow icon and it says away.

2. When I just set the presence indicator to on it works, but it auto aways me after a certain amount of time. This is in spite of my settings of "status when connected - on" and "auto-away - disabled". There is no way I can stay on for extended amounts of time

My solution:
Set my presence status when connected to off and my auto-away to disabled. When I connect to the internet my presence will be off, but all I have to do is set it to on and it never regresses back to auto-away. This is cumbersome, especially if you go online and offline constantly throughout the day but it works. Anyone else encounter this problem? I am using aim and gmail chat accounts, but this happens to both.