I have also been having problems with Kopete 0.7.1 for about 1 week now. I'm getting all sorts of errors, from timing out, connection refused to wrong passwords. I'm currently configuring Kopete 0.9.0 and QT 3.2.2 for install (not sure if might be part of the problem or not).
A few friends of mine on IRC are also complaining of connection failures. They are using Trillian/gAIM-win32 and Windows/MSN Messenger. A friend in New Jersey, and another in Greece have been reporting intermittent connection problems over the last few days. When I AM able to connect (rarely, maybe for 1-2 hours per day), there are very few of my contacts online (most are on 24/7), which tells me they might have been kicked offline also. I feel the problem is on Micro$oft's end (what else is new). I wasn't able to get to the Messenger home page, OR ping the servers today (but the DNS did resolve an IP address). I have never tried to ping these servers, so I'm not sure if their firewall drops ICMP packets or not, but it just timed out for me. The fact that
http://messenger.msn.com yielded an error (not a 404) tells me its probably internal problems on micro$oft's end.
I doubt my upgrade to Kopete 0.9.0 will fix anything, but thought I'd share that this seems to be (at least in part) an issue that we have no control over.
Anyone else having this problem too??
Cheers!