Comment 30 for bug 435329

1) I think empathy always starts and sets the status to whatever it was when it quit last, at least it appears to for me. That wouldn't be related to this bug though.
2) The empathy contact list remembers the last known state, which using the status icon could be hidden and still exit. If you start it back up again, it will display the window if it was visible prior to the last exit. That behavior isn't related to the indicator, just how empathy was designed.
3) This isn't trivial, if you remove the indicator applet we don't actually know the indicator is no longer interested in empathy. There is a service that is running which doesn't get killed just by removing the applet. If you remove the applet then run "killall indicator-messages-service", you will see the status icon. Or, remove the applet, logout and back in. You will also see the status icon and no indicator applet. Hopefully in a future version of the indicator applet, it will stop the services it starts when it is removed.