I've also seen this occur twice and had to manually re-enable the buddy list in prefs.xml as described in this bug.
Ubuntu 14.04 Pidgin 2.10.9 (libpurple 2.10.9) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to pidgin in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/295961 Title: GUI doesn't show when list_visible is 0 Status in “pidgin” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: Binary package hint: pidgin Sometimes, and it doesn't seem very predictable, the pidgin GUI fails to show on the screen. There's a "pidgin" process running on the machine. Am not sure if I'm visible online at that stage. Anyway, the fix is to go into ~/.purple/prefs.xml and change "list_visible" from 0 to 1. It always seems to be 0 when this problem occurs, and changing it to 1 fixes it. You have to kill the pidgin process first, as it re-writes the file on exit, so kill pidgin, edit prefs.xml, change list_visible from 0 to 1, save the file, start pidgin. Works fine - the GUI appears. In a note to myself, I also mentioned changing "show_empty_groups" to 0 - I haven't seen that at 1 recently, so not sure if that was a red herring. Anyway, it's setting list_visible from 0 to 1 which makes the GUI reappear and everything work fine again ProblemType: Bug Architecture: i386 Date: Sun Nov 9 14:30:52 2008 DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04 ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/pidgin NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia Package: pidgin 1:2.5.0-0ubuntu2~hardy1 PackageArchitecture: i386 ProcEnviron: SHELL=/bin/bash PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 SourcePackage: pidgin Uname: Linux 2.6.24-21-generic i686 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pidgin/+bug/295961/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
