Comment 11 for bug 558872

I had this problem, and I found a work around.

For those who don't want to read a lot: I set my keyring manager's password to blank, and set empathy and gwibber as startup applications. To find out how, read on.

First, what I saw wrong: I did an in-place upgrade today from 9.10. I have auto log-on enabled; did it a ways back, many Ubuntu versions ago. When I booted up, keyring manager would ask me to unlock. After typing in my password, I would notice that Indicator Applet Session had all the status options grayed out, and had no text box for typing in. In the Indicator Applet menu, there were no little white arrows on the left (which seem to appear when the relevant program is running, background or foreground). If I clicked on Chat to open Empathy, Empathy showed no contacts, and opening Edit > Accounts showed they were all "Offline - Status is set to offline". Gwibber seemed to work fine, once I opened it by clicking Broadcast in the Indicator Applet menu (though I did not try posting anything). However, the text box still did not appear in the Indicator Applet Session. I did not try the things the OP did to get the Empathy accounts to connect.

Now, the work around: I opened up Seahorse using Applications > Accessories > Passwords and Encryptions Keys, right clicked "Passwords: login", and changed my password to be black (it wasn't before). By the way, this is probably generally a bad idea security wise. After rebooting, the keyring manager did not pop up asking for anything, but things still looked the same. But then, clicking Chat and Broadcast in Indicator Applet made Indicator Applet Session work wonderfully, and my accounts logged in in Empathy. Then, I just set empathy and gwibber to run automatically in System > Preferences > Startup Applications, rebooted, and everything was awesome. Gwibber does pop up on screen when the desktop loads, but that's OK for now.