Comment 12 for bug 538963

@Omer Akram, You opened a theme task for this bug and mentioned that your bug was different , and left the theme task still open.
If you have thought it was not a theme bug, task should have been closed , saves others the trouble of having to clean up after you!
Or you must mention why the task is open still, Which you hadnt! Hence i closed the bug.

Alteast, the second time you reopened with steps to reproduce to suspect it was a theme bug. Which is good.
If you are in bug-control you should be more careful with bugs , if you dont have time to properly work a bug, do fewer bugs and triage them properly. You can notice the empathy status change in this bug went to triaged , without even sending upstream or trying to debug the problem. [confirmed and triaged are not the same]

Have you tried to resize any other window and notice what happens?
Anyways, Try to resize a nautilus window horizontally. breadcrumbs will almost completely disappear , this is what happens with empathy too. [notice here the nautilus window does not restrict with the menubar, the menubar gets partially as well]
OTOH ,resize a GNOME Character Map window , the toolbar elements wont allow it to be reduced to anything smaller.

and this is not a theme bug.The theme uses the option:

style "menu-item"
{
 xthickness = 0

If this size is increased to 2 or greater than 2 this problem wont be noticed , since the menu items will have more space. and the wider menubar will prevent the window from becoming smaller.
This will happen for any theme which uses less padding[=0] for the menu items and changing this in the default theme is not the solution.

The problem here is Empathy allows the window to be resized to smaller size , and stops only when the _menubar_ size has been reached. Empathy needs to set the minimum size according to the widgets width it uses and not menubar size.
If Emapthy forces a size it would prevent the widget from disappearing.