I just want to point out that I totally inferred that 'steadyflux' was a 'her' and not a 'his'. This bears interest, because it seems that I subconsciously affix Snark's avatar on top of any poster who is unidentified.

But then, who can blame me?

Quoting Tansunn

As much as I like Pidgin, I've been experiencing near-daily crashes for months.

That's interesting Tansunn, and I'm sorry that you've been experiencing trouble with it. If you continue to have problems, my advice is to create an issue in the Pidgin issue tracker. If someone contacts you for additional information, then perhaps you can help to fix a bug. While there may not be anything obvious to report right now, someone might have a debug release for you to run which would produce detailed logs of the crash so that they can diagnose and fix the problem for a future release. Such is software development. It certainly never hurts to report, even if all you've got is a vague description. =]

In the meantime, if Pidgin continues to malfunction then I'd say Digsby and Trillian both offer reasonable alternatives for multi-protocol, free clients.