Instant Messaging (IM) is a pain if your customers and friends are using different systems (MSN, AOL, ICQ,...).
There are a few out there (jabber,...) but I do prefer Gaim, which is an open source project and it is doing fine.
The main reason for me to use Gaim is that it will save all my conversions automaticly - in MSN Messenger (which I have used so far) you must do this manually which means that I forget it.
Before you install Gaim on your Windows platform, you must have the GTK+ Runtime Environment installed. After that you can install Gaim.
Nice summary... thanks for posting it.