I just got home from a trip and pidgin is totally freakin nuts.
It says half the people are off line but they are posting and show
online elsewhere. Its oddly freezing up. I cant type anything on the
chat screen. Then its popping ME on and off line.

Is anyone else seeing this just over the weekend?

No, and it never happened. But there were some trouble with Picasa, I
repeatedly uninstalled, purged and reinstalled it but kept crashing. Then I
added the repos from Google and installed it via command line and now it is up
and running OK.In case of a misbehaving program what should we do ? Just
uninstall it and reinstall it ?

Im not sure at this point. I have never done that with linux before but
then again, I havent had a app mess up like this needing that. This is
windows behavior.

uninstall and reinstall? no, I've never seen that method fix any problem
in linux. If there is a problem with an app it's most likely in your
personal data. The app itself is a system resource and you as a user
have no way to corrupt it. Your own data though, you can easily mess up.

In your case, perhaps you finally got a good version of picasa when you
added the google repos.

I've fixed many applications by completely removing and
re-installing. Sometimes things go wrong in the installation process,
especially if you have PPAs and many third party repos (as I do). When
Ubuntu does an upgrade it may not be able to complete it and leave some
parts upgraded and other parts not. By removing an application you can allow
the upgrade process to complete and restore a level playing field of sorts.

Picasa is not a native Linux application. It has been ported over courtesy
of Google. I personally would not use it because Digikam is so much better
and faster, but that is up to the individual user. There are many reasons
for it to crash including the source, version number, memory (it is a
resource hog) and conflicts.

Below is a link to a tutorial on how to install Picasa 3.5 the latest
version in Ubuntu. It involves installing 3.0 in Ubuntu, adding the
repository to your sources.list and then installing 3.5 in Wine. Then
copying the files from Wine to the root directory. I don't use Picasa or
Wine, but it sounds like fun to try.

www.omgubuntu.co.uk/.../...a-35-linux-install.html

Yes, indeed, Picasa is a resource hog, especially with tens of
thousands of pictures loaded and especially when it swallows up tens or hundreds
of pictures. Open Office Writer is also a resource hog but only when it loads a
huge file containing pictures, some 100 or more MB files. I managed to overcome
this problem by making the picture files smaller by exporting them from Picasa
(for me it is the easiest and most convenient way) and putting only these, small
pics into the documents. Of course, I always keep the original, high resolution
pics. Another resource hog is Gnome, which I like sometimes but I rarely use.

There could be something to your idea about a failed upgrade, in the
case of an app not supplied by canonical - the old config files could be
incompatible with the new version of the app, whereas a canonical
supplied app would handle the config upgrade as well - but that's not
the common case.

I've been helping people install linux since 1993, and I've never seen a
case where someone installs an app, it doesn't work, and removing it and
reinstalling it fixes the problem. What I have seen is that the personal
config in their home dir can get messed up for whatever reason - and
removing their dot config file or directory resets everything to vanilla
and the app works again.