Oops, father has gone, wait for me, wait…!

So out of the blue last night, Pidgin (version 2.5.2) crashed on me and when I
tried to relaunch it, it would only stay open for a brief moment. I hadn’t done
any updates to my system since my last reboot, so I couldn’t imagine it was some
new busted package. I tried launching it from the command line to find that
there was a segmentation fault. Passing —debug ended up giving me a DNS error
with a pretty nifty message, “Oops, father has gone, wait for me, wait…!” I
went ahead and passed —nologin which got the program running, but as soon as I
tried to connect with any of my services (AIM, Gtalk and IRC) it would bomb out,
seemingly at random times. I systematically went through my accounts and found
that a certain AIM account was the issue. It seemed whenever that account was
connected, it would try to load the buddy information and then died on a
specific person. I don’t think that person was necessarily the issue, as this
morning I tried to connect that account, and everything worked out fine. Might
have to call unsolved mysteries on this one.