Comment 6 for bug 490546

@Dave: It doesn't look like anything has been lost. The issue is that on a _default_ and _clean_ install of Ubuntu 9.10 (in which the default IM client is Empathy) if I install pidgin it 'steals' all my IM accounts and details from Empathy. The first time I re-ran empathy it had lost access to it's account settings. I think that the cleanest way to try and reproduce this would be in a VM with Ubuntu 9.10 and see what happens if after configuring and running empathy you install pidgin.