Windows Users

DLL Hell and Win Pidgin

A very common but very unpleasant Windows SNAFU (known as DLL Hell) has been experienced by many Win Pidgin users.

Symptom: Win Pidgin crashes routinely on startup (but not necessarily just on startup).

Cause: Dlls with the same name as those that Pidgin uses are found in the dll search path and are used instead of those installed by Pidgin, likely causing Pidgin to malfunction. This can happen when application developers install their dlls to Windows system directories. The most commonly used dll to cause dll hell is zlib.dll.

What to do if Pidgin crashes

First make sure that you are not affected by 'Dll Hell' as described above. Download and install the debug version of Win Pidgin. The next time you run Pidgin and it crashes, the call stack will be dumped to pidgin.RPT in your Pidgin install dir. When submitting a bug report, give a detailed description on how to produce your bug and attach the most recent crash dump from your pidgin.RPT

All Other Users

See ​http://pidgin.im/gdb.php (Note: these instructions should be moved to the wiki at some point soon.)