I’ve been using Gaim on windows as my instant messenging client for several years now. For quite a while now there have been some unfortunate bugs in the user-interface which have something to do with Windows and the windowing toolkit Gaim uses (GTK I think). Anyway the long and short is I haven’t been particularly happy with it lately. Over Christmas holiday my brother showed me the latest Adium. I’d tried it a couple of times in the past and while there were things I liked about it, it was very crash-prone and I never seriously considered switching to it. Until now that is. Whatever was causing all the crashing seems to be gone – no crashes so far in a couple of weeks of use. It’s got an excellent, very customizable interface, it’s based on the same libraries as gaim so its compatibility with the various IM engines is very high, and it’s got some clever scripting hooks built in. It’s mac-only, sorry windows folk, but well worth a look if you’re on that platform. It’s caused me to move my IM stuff off of the PC altogether, home and work.