Comment 12 for bug 1001405

I had the same / a similar issue today. The Pidgin window was not showing up, after I killed the Pidgin process, since it was hanging when shutting down normally.

The shutdown was not commencing at this point:
(10:48:26) proxy: Connection in progress
dns[13098]: nobody needs me... =(
(10:48:55) prefs: /pidgin/blist/list_visible changed, scheduling save.
(10:49:01) util: Writing file prefs.xml to directory /home/*****/.purple
(10:49:01) util: Writing file /home/*****/.purple/prefs.xml

The reason why I tried to restart Pidgin was my Office Communicator (SIPE) plugin (running at current latest version 1.23.0), which was not able to connect to our Lync server (which itself has probably the issue at the moment).

Then I tried to restart Pidgin and it was not showing up anymore. The reason is the /pidgin/blist/list_visible property which have been changed to 0 in the previous shutdown. When I switched it back to 1 in the /home/*****/.purple/prefs.xml like:
<pref name='blist'>
 [...]
 <pref name='list_visible' type='bool' value='1'/>
 [...]
</pref>

The Pidgin window is showing up again.