For some reason, I am kicked off of AOL Instant Messenger every two hours, like clockwork (the auto-reconnect dialog currently shows 9:44, 11:44, and 13:47 as the disconnect times). It wouldn't be a big deal, since gaim comes with the auto-reconnect plugin, except that upon reconnecting, any away message I had previously put up disappears.

This is obviously a nuisance, since I can be away from my computer for days at a time, and having some generic away message isn't very useful to me or any of my buddies. I have the same experience using AOL's Linux client, but not with the Windows client. Am I the only one having this problem? What can I do about this?

Nobody's ever experienced this? Am I just nuts?

Why not try some other instant message client such as Kopete, though i'm not sure it will make much difference if Gaim and the AOL linux client did the same thing.

Another option which would be relatively simple is to download Gaim's source, do a grep for one of the default away messages, change it, then recompile. Probably a hastle, but its the only thing I can think of at the moment.