empathy-accounts corrupted and now crashing/broken

[John Pye]

For some time now, my Empathy window has always shown up with an error about failing to connect to my Google Talk account. When I look at the Accounts dialog, I saw TWO copies of my Google Talk account. If I removed one of these by clicking the [-] icon, then the error message would go away and everything work work fine.

Except that every time I started Empathy, the duplicate account would reappear.

Today, I thought I would be clever. I renamed the duplicate account by hovering over its name-text in the Accounts box, and adding some random text at the end of the name. Then I clicked the [-] to remove the duplicate account.

This time, when the Accounts dialog closed, there were no online contacts shown. When I attempted to open the Accounts box now, nothing appears.

When I type 'empathy-accounts', nothing shows, and the command exits silents after about 20 seconds.

Now my Empathy is completely broken -- I can't see a way to refresh it back to no accounts again. Where are the Accounts stored? How can I clean them out? What's causing this crashed/broken behaviour?

I'm on latest Empathy with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

Thanks for taking time in filing the bug to make ubuntu better.
1) can you reproduce this bug ?
2) if so than please define the steps to reproduce it ?
 check that your system must be up to date
use this way to report the bug
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for empathy (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Jeff Farthing (jfarthing84)]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open Empathy and add a Google Talk account.
2. Log out of Ubuntu.
3. Log in to Ubuntu.
4. Open Empathy.
5. See two accounts.

When you open up Edit > Accounts, you'll see the duplicate listed with a status of "Unavailable - Network Error".

Also, probably related, duplicate contacts are shown for a Google Talk account as well. For instance, I only have one group that I created, called "Clients". However, there is another group that appears, called "Personal" that also displays all of my clients.

[Ian Ohr (munk3h)]

I am experiencing this same problem. What extra information can I provide to improve the situation?
I'm on 12.04 LTS and I'm up to date as of 2013-12-03@12:43

[Ian Ohr (munk3h)]

The difference I am seeing in my situation is that when I remove the duplicate google account that is failing to authenticate, I can no longer use the Accounts window. It opens, then immediately closes.

If I run it from a bash shell I get:

$ empathy-accounts
**
ERROR:empathy-contact-widget.c:402:contact_widget_details_update_edit: assertion failed: (spec != NULL)
Aborted (core dumped)
$

Would the core file be useful to debugging this?

[Ian Ohr (munk3h)]

Having searched, I think I have Bug #1187355