See, I'm helpful!
The official client is just so bloated, I switched long ago. Glad to help. AIM open-sourced their protocol a long time ago.
I never meant to imply that it wasn't a good idea, I just try to shy away from giving the answer "use something else" in my line of work, and it spills over into my personal habits. Pidgin is great, but it does have some limitations (such as no video chat support in the Windows version - yet) and I wasn't really sure what UMD needed to do.
A lot of people prefer AIM because of the pretty themes and colors. No comment
