I've also seen this occur twice and had to manually re-enable the buddy list in prefs.xml as described in this bug.
Ubuntu 14.04 Pidgin 2.10.9 (libpurple 2.10.9)
I've also seen this occur twice and had to manually re-enable the buddy list in prefs.xml as described in this bug.
Ubuntu 14.04
Pidgin 2.10.9 (libpurple 2.10.9)