ymessenger been working fine, sudden freezing problem

Greetings.

I've been running the latest Yahoo messenger for Linux for some time now out of Redhat 9, no problems. Tonight, I asked my boy to check my email for messages, and I believe he hit the desktop launch, instead of opening up the ymessenger dialogue I already had opened. In the past, this little mistake has never caused much more of a problem than logging me out entirely, but tonight it's far worse.

The program is freezing up completely, to the point where I have to open up the system monitor to end the process, and one time it didn't even show ymessenger as running. I've rebooted three times now, hoping that whatever bug this put up yahoo's butt would be dislodged, but no luck. I've done as extensive a search as I can think of on Google, here, and on some other Linux sites, as well as Yahoo's site (USELESS), and Redhat's site (soon to be useless?). Again, to no avail.

I have no idea if my download of the Opera 7.23 rpm last night could have anything to do with this, it wouldn't make sense as it has nothing to do with wine, and the first error messages the boy generated with showing in wineloader.

I am at a complete loss here as to what to do, my brain is overloaded as three machines in this house (all Winders boxes) have managed to be nailed by different Trojans, then my sister's machine (6-7yo+) was taken apart by her friend and good luck trying to find a mobo or video card to replace what the woman farked up! I think my thought processes just aren't working, and that the trouble may be obvious, but with all the recent troubles I'm not "seeing" it. Help?

try removing the ".ymessenger" directory in your home directory and start ymessenger again

The ONLY way I have been able to use Yahoo Messenger at all is the web-based version. And in only works through Mozilla, and only after you download a Java runtime environment plug-in. If you go to http://messenger.yahoo.com/ using Mozilla and scroll down to 'Launch Yahoo! Web Messenger Beta' and click on it, you will be directed to the site where the plug-in can be downloaded. Oh yeah....best part of the whole thing is that once you download the plug-in and are able to use Messenger, for some reason when I send a message to someone, I have to minimize Messenger and then maximize before I can send another! GAIM has proven worthless as for as Messenger, even the latest version I downloaded.

Why using Yahoo Messenger has to be such a pain for Mandrake users, especially in comparison to other IM clients, is a mystery to me.

Hope this is helpful.

Thanks folks. I ended up taking a chill pill, and talking to my Gentoo man. After about two minutes of conversation we decided to just do "apt-get remove ymessenger", then I went to Yahoo's site and got the rpm, and put it in a desktop folder, clicked the puppy, self-installed.. ended up taking me less time to do that than it did to type up my request! LOULE!

I'm not at all familiar with Mandrake, I sure haven't had these troubles with Yahoo in RH9.. though it has definitely taken some tweaking to eliminate problems such as having a message pop up and it "takes" the text I'm typing and puts it into the new message window (I usually remain invisible, or it's an onslaught & I'd get nothing done), which lets 'em know I'm in. In searching the "Messenger for Unix" page, I only see versions for Redhat, Debian, and FreeBSD.. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some trick to configuring at least the FreeBSD version, but damned if I'd know how!

In the meantime, I would like to sing the praises of an otherwise very stable OS, with little vulnerability to the worms, viruses, and Trojans the rest of my family on this LAN are experiencing. The latest (and most insidious) is the Trojan Downloader. Hit the youngest boy via email. Oldest boy doesn't use email, but his box is currently infected (btw, lettuce sing the praises of AVG for finding what Norton and McAffee couldn't.. Amen).