Pidgin Wiped-Out All User Accounts after upgrade

[Sam Williams]

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=hardy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu hardy (development branch)"

pidgin:
  Installed: 1:2.3.1-2ubuntu1

I just upgraded my system and all my im accounts went away. Pidgin started up and asked me to start defining accounts. I didn't have too many defined already, but this is a bit annoying.

Good Luck!

[mdmoncel (mdmoncel)]

This occured on my systems as well, but we also lose accounts every time our system crashed while pidgin is active.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom reproducible in 8.10 or 9.04?

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.

[Jesus Molina (quidam-)]

I reproduce this error in debian, here is the only place with a reported bug btw.

The problem is caused because we are using msn-pescan plugin for pidgin, this give msn protocol 15 support but this plugin have an error writing ~/.pidgin/accounts.xml.

(12:09:00) util: Reading file accounts.xml from directory /home/quidam/.purple
(12:09:00) xmlnode: Error parsing xml file: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
Bytes: 0xE9 0x66 0x6F 0x6E

(12:09:00) util: Error parsing file /home/quidam/.purple/accounts.xml. Renaming old file to accounts.xml~
(12:09:00) util: Writing file accounts.xml~ to directory /home/quidam/.purple
(12:09:00) util: Writing file /home/quidam/.purple/accounts.xml~

if I remove this plugin and reconfigure all the accounts using the right protocols (MSN), the problem is solved.

Regards
J.