Comment 7 for bug 144122

Odd... can someone verify? I'm not at home at the moment. If it doesn't work, then at least the prefs.xml is solid, and should be repackaged with pidgin-data..

Note that you should also remove the item "docklet.so".

A few last clarifying points:
The prefs.xml in /etc/purple/prefs.xml is just a template for default prefs (like when you create a new user, or delete your own prefs.xml in your home folder). Pidgin writes preference changes on a per-account basis, in ~/.purple/prefs.xml when the program closes. This is why I was initially so confused about the problem, because I thought the prefs.xml was changing correctly, but it was not. You can not change the prefs.xml with Pidgin open; it will revert. Also, this bug DOES affect ALL Gusty users: I believe those this did not happen to were users who had manually installed Pidgin or grabbed a .deb of it before upgrading to Gusty (when I was on amd64, this is what I had done). I believe this bug only affects those who will be installing Pidgin for the first time with Gusty.

This patch should be immediately applied to the appropriate repository.