Off and on for the past several months I have been struggling with an extremely frustrating bug / strange behavior with the (nevertheless) greatest instant messaging client ever written, Gaim. Sometimes, when I would start Gaim, the windows for logging on to my account would appear normally, but the buddy list window would be invisible. I could tell that Gaim was still running by looking at the output of ps(1), and incoming instant messages would even pop up (visible) conversation windows and work just fine. But my instant messaging activities would be seriously impaired since I couldn't start conversations or see who was online. Restarting Gaim (or even my X server) had no effect. Then eventually - perhaps days or weeks later - I would just start up Gaim and the problem would seem to be gone. Despite searching far and wide on the web, I could find no mention of this phenomenon. I have been experiencing this problem off and on across many versions of Gaim.

Now that I have finally discovered a way to fix this problem when it crops up, I'm saying something about it so google will discover it and others may be saved some time. If this happens to you, shut down Gaim and look in the file where Gaim saves your preferences. On a typical Unix/Linux system, this is "~/.gaim/prefs.xml". In that file, look for lines that look similar to the following.

⟨pref name='x' type='int' value='-43' /⟩
⟨pref name='y' type='int' value='-39' /⟩

Change them to have zeroes as below.

⟨pref name='x' type='int' value='0' /⟩
⟨pref name='y' type='int' value='0' /⟩

Start up Gaim again and hopefully the problem will be fixed. One of these days I'm going to find out how to properly reproduce it and then submit a bug report. I imagine Gaim alone is not the culprit but rather an interaction between Gaim and my window manager (fvwm2, especially due to the fact that I use multiple desktops).