I like Pidgin because it allows me to have all communicator accounts in one place. However few weeks ago I was forced to use Kadu as my Gadu-Gadu client. Pidgin started to hang while trying to connect to Gadu-Gadu (or few seconds after it). Happily there is am easy way to fix this. First of all, we need to disable Gadu-Gadu account. To do so, we need to edit ~/.purple/accounts.xml file:
vim ~/.purple/accounts.xml
Now we need to find Gadu-Gadu section. There should be a tag like this:
<setting name='auto-login' type='bool'>1</setting>
We need to change the value to 0, so the Gadu-Gadu account won't start automatically. Thanks to this, it won't crash or hang whole Pidgin communicator.
<setting name='auto-login' type='bool'>0</setting>
Then start Pidgin, go to Accounts -> Add/Edit, edit the Gadu-Gadu account:
Select the "Proxy" tab (the last one) and choose "No proxy" option. Click "Save" and restart Pidgin. Gadu-Gadu protocol should work like a charm.