Comment 6 for bug 290914

I have had the same problem with Pidgin locking up in Ubuntu. Found work around without trying.

Toshiba A135 S4656
sound driver = snd-hda-intel

I didn't notice that I had done anything to fix it. My sound card wasn't working at all. I had to compile the alsa driver manually and install it. The sound card worked fine and I didn't notice this at the time, but that's also when Pidgin stopped locking up. I also noticed yesterday when I had some problems with my soundcard driver failing for some reason that a few minutes later, my Pidgin instance locked up. I thought, "Well it's time for a reboot." Of course, the sound card came up and Pidgin didn't lock again all day.