Thanks for the tip- I have used several IM multi-clients, having found them desirable, but have not found one that was worthy- All seem to be rather hinky... Unreliable to say the least. I will certainly be checking on Pidgin.
Pidgin is great! I switched my family over when AOL dropped support for the old 4.x clients, and DeadAIM was incompatible with the newer, bloated, ad-laden clients. And, it's a major cross platform open source project. The earlier versions (formerly known as Gaim until AOL threatened legal action over the AIM trademark) were a little sluggish, but the latest versions are zippy and stable.