Comment 3 for bug 288468

I've had the same problem. I didn't manage to debug the crash (quite complicated because it's a async x issue and I couldn't get enough debug symbols (why dont -dbgsym packages state dependencies?)

However, I did manage to track it down to the gconf key xchat/main_window/background_type. When this is set to 2 (transparency), xchat-gnome fails to start.