Pidgin Accounts disappearing

This is the second time it happened to me (now on Ubuntu 9.10, since 9.04). I reported first here (bug 331863), but I will leave posted in my blog for my reference.

The issue is that every time you start pidgin, the initial screen comes up with no Accounts registered, and even if you do that, it still pops up back with no accounts.

In the here (bug 331863), some people reported locking issues, but with me it was the simple fact that the pidgin home directory was created by root and not by my user, hence the pidgin application did not have enough permissions to store any data there.

To solve it, simply change the owner of the folder to your own username:

# do it recursively if there are any files in there (not likely though)
user@localhost:~$ sudo chown user:user ~/.purple/ -R

And pidgin should be able now to store your account info there.