However that too experiences many problems and the modern win32 obsession of creating irritating GUI mutations is probably the reason. Eg. window creation sometimes hangs wine, dragging window location sometimes hangs wine, fonts seem to go haywire from time to time, preferences dialog seems to have various breakages, etc.
These are probably various unrelated bugs in Wine. I've also seen the hang when dragging Trillian, I think the reason is that in order to do non-opaque dragging wine locks the X server, and then if the mouse moves too fast it "releases" the drag and doesn't release X. It looks like the machine has locked, but killing wine releases everything.
It might be better to try and fix wine, but if you're not feeling like some happy hacking...... :)
So I was interested in trying out "Miranda I-M" which looked from the screenshots (in default mode anyhow) to be a reasonably conventional-looking win32 GUI client and seems to be under active development judging by sourceforge stats.
Unfortunately after installation, which went pretty well, the program fails to start quite early on with this;
fixme:file:FindFirstChangeNotificationA this is not supported yet (non-trivial).
This is almost certainly not the problem, unless this program has a _very_ unusual installation procedure. What that function does is allow the program to be notified by Windows when something changes on disk afaik, the equivalent on Linux is FAM or dnotify.
Programs usually use it to give a more responsive GUI, ie if something on disk changes while it's showing you a directory you don't have to manually force a refresh.
I'd suggest doing a relay trace and seeing what's really going on, installs can fail for a variety of reasons.
(1) is the above something that I can work on and/or help anyone else work on?
For sure, it'd be nice to have but I don't know if it'd solve that problem.
(2) does anyone know of any other win32-based I-M client (supporting at least ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, AIM) that is stable under wine?
I'm working on getting RhymBox, a rather spiffy Jabber client, working under Wine (rhymbox.org) - at the moment though it doesn't even start :)
You might simply be better off hacking on one of the linux IM clients to bring it up to scratch. For other Win32 clients, check the apps db
thanks -mike