Chris, based upon your recommendation, I tried Adium X 0.76 over the past week. Although it looks nice and works fine in daily use, even as beta, it crashed often when configuring my logins and importing buddy lists. Further, it mangles them, changing MSN buddies into broken AIM handles. An even bigger no-no, it imports every HotMail address in Address Book and converts them into instant messenger buddies, even those not so designated. They then get a buddy list invitation!

Upon returning to Fire 1.5.1, I then found every HotMail handle broken, set as AIM handles again, but missing their "alias names" and other data I entered into Fire's local buddy records. Converting back to AIM buddies then added each to all my AIM accounts. Depending upon their AOL client, settings, and status, that sends yet more AIM invitations using logins I had not intended to use with everyone! That sucks big.

To be sure, Fire lets you make this same mistake, but you can avoid it by adding buddies using only your logged in account and then unmarking your other logins. And to be fair, Adium is young and hold promise, but for now, Fire.sourceforge.net works better.

John

Well, an AIM client may try to do that too; I had to tell mine to not to tack my client information at the end of my identifier. Using a nickname or screen name may help.

You might reconsider.

about the chat thing of course.