Every time I close Pidgin I have to delete accounts.xml in order to make it sign in again without throwing an error and crashing. As I have next to no knowledge of this program's inner workings I have no idea what's causing the problem or where to begin fixing it.

The only other weird thing I can think of is that the only contact I have ever added via Pidgin instead of Microsoft's client appears to have vanished into the ether, but as I have no idea how this could possibly relate to accounts.xml I have no way of knowing whether it's related or not, other than my intuition telling me that it's a ridiculous idea, but with computers I can never know for sure. Also, I have all the extra protocols installed, so I don't know if it's them that's the problem.

If no one else here has any idea either, could I please have some information on how to do a clean reinstall of Pidgin, that is, how to completely wipe all traces of it and its extensions from my device, so I can start afresh.

Thanks.

Are you sure that accounts.xml is causing this problem?

My experience was/is that mainly prefs.xml is bugging pidgin - especially with the status bar plugin installed.

Because the format is xml it's very easy to understand and edit. So maybe we could do something there but first you need to be sure that accounts.xml is your problem.

I am pretty sure accounts.xml is the problem as it is the one that has to be deleted to make Pidgin work. With any of the others deleting them has no effect.

Thanks for the fast reponse.

if you delete your accounts.xml and start pidgin again, you don't have any accounts left, right?

then you should just recreate one account, connect to it, quit pidgin, start pidgin again and look if it's working.

- working: the account is not responsible for the problem. so recreate the next account and so on and so on.

- not working: the account is bugging pidgin.

then it would be interesting which protocol the account is using and how the <account>-part in the xml looks like.

(if you want to post the xml as code here, please don't forget to delete or "xxxxx"-out your sensitive data (like passwords etc))

I've already done that. The account must be bugging pidgin. It works one time then crashes the next time I sign in. I only have one account, my MSN.

Use the Butterfly plugin, it works for me like a charm.

then please post your accounts.xml in [ code] ... [ /code] tags here - and don't forget to censor your password

the only difference i can see is following line:

this line isn't in my xml-file at all. try to delete it.

but i have to say... very strange problem so far.

sorry, how do I edit it? All I've used so far is rm and cat :P

And what's the butterfly plugin?

hehe.

you have some ways to do it.

1. on your n900:
1.1. install leafpad (via appmanager)
1.2. open up xterm
1.3. type "leafpad .purple/accounts.xml"
1.4. edit and save
or
(the hard way ^^)
1.1. open up xterm
1.2. type "vi .purple/accounts.xml"
1.3. go to the line you want to delete
1.4. type "dd"
1.5. type ":wq!"

on your pc:
1.1. open up xterm
1.2. type "cp .purple/accounts.xml MyDocs/.documents/"
1.3. connect your phone to your pc and go to your documents-folder
1.4. open the accounts.xml in any editor and save the changes
1.5. unmount your n900 and disconnect it
1.6. go back to xterm
1.7. type "cp MyDocs/.documents/accounts.xml .purple/"

(you can auto-complete the folder-/file-names in xterm via clicking on "TAB")