Comment 2 for bug 385639

Strangely, after a few days of all seeming well, pidgin crashed and wouldn't restart. Looking at debugging messages, I found that it somehow had discovered the 2.5.4 libraries were still in /usr/local. (it was the 2.5.5 ones that were previously removed to fix the previous problem with trying 2.5.6. I'd somehow overlooked the presence of the still older 2.5.4 libraries). I found I still had that source version around, so I tried as root, "make uninstall". It didn't work, but rather than try to debug why, I just used rm to rip the old version out of /usr/local. pidgin resumed working after that. I'm mystified how things could have been OK for a while and then the older library suddenly was noticed?? Bottom line is that with default library search paths in Ubuntu Intrepid, it evidently is real important to purge away all older versions of the purple libraries from /usr/local before plugging into the new repository for automatic pidgin updates. The install instructions should warn about this. If pidgin in [/usr/bin, /usr/lib] can't be happy coexisting with a different version in [/usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib], then maybe the install scripts should watch out for that situation and rip the incompatible version out of /usr/local/lib before it causes trouble.