Well I have seen this behaviour occasionally, but it hasn't never relate to client and IM gateway with me, it just happends... With 'native' client in windows and other clients including IM gateway... Then again it isn't (too) common here so it doesn't bother me that much.

Almost without exception, clients cache their own copies of the avatars and will use them if they can't find a server side one.  So if you've seen an avatar at some point, it'll stick with you for at least a little while.  These things appear to "time out" after some period of time, probably defined by the person writing the avatar support in the client.

Well as a Pidgin and Adium X user, I can tell you that I've migrated between versions of the IM Gateway plugin that supports avatars and don't support avatars and my avatar has remained for a long time.  I really don't know what would trigger the avatars to vanish from cache eventually.  Maybe they don't.  But I know the two of them cache avatars and keep them around.  I even noticed this when switching from the python based transports to the IM Gateway plugin before it had avatars.  I had to wipe my entire profile to get it to clear.

Hmh... okay... After a night I see exact same behaviour with MSN transport as before, so there definately is now some pretty serious problem with (at least) MSN transport... Or would this go into same category as my first problem reported here where atleast developer can't reproduce failure? :-p

Would you like an testingaccount on my server so you could see what happends? I don't know what else I could offer in order to solve these weird problems I seem to be plagued with.

Regarding the avatars, If turning them off stabilizes the connection, ... well first off, again I can't reproduce this.  I've been connected to MSN just fine, no disconnects.  =(  That said, couple of questions ..

do y'all have a -lot- of MSN contacts?  maybe post me an approximate number.

I'm wondering if either there's a protocol violation (which should be visible in the debug logs) -or- we're breaching some sort of rate limiting.  Hard to say without being able to see things as they occur.  =(

If any of you can join me in the weekly chat this week, I might be able to get some more info out of you about it.  Maybe even have you try it on my own server to see if you experience the same behavior.

Was it happening -that- regularly that a couple of minutes was enough time to test it breaking?