Similarly named buddy groups destroy buddy organisation

This may depend on a few factors, so firstly I will give my current GAIM setup: 1 MSN account, 2 Yahoo! accounts, 2 IRC accounts (which are not online by default), some Yahoo! buddies are used in both accounts so have 2 buddy list entries, buddy groups include Friends, friends, Contacts, Family, Temporary, Sheffield, Chat Rooms.
OK, now what I did:
1) Added the group "friends" and moved a few buddies into it
2) Added the group "Friends" and moved the buddies previously in "friends" into it
3) Deleted group "friends"

Problems (some or all of these may happen):
1) Error dialogue appears with an MSN problem
2) GAIM crashes
3) Buddies become rearranged after every reconnect/restart
4) Buddy groups get swapped (for me the members of "Family" kept entering "friends")
5) Previously deleted groups reappear (for me the group "Sheffield" keeps coming back, as well as the group "Temporary" which I tried to use as an intermediary for storing buddies whilst deleting both "friends" and "Friends" and starting again. That didn't work by the way)
6) The groups "friends" and "Friends" cannot be renamed or deleted, this either crashes GAIM or reverts back at next reconnect/restart
7) Random new buddy group appears with unintelligible name (unicode characters, etc.)
8) Buddies appear in multiple groups (when the duplicates are dragged into the same group the original they disappear)

This is getting pretty annoying, and I think it is something to do with MSN not being case-sensitive or something. The most annoying part is that any attempt to sort out the buddies or remove the problematic groups either crashes GAIM or gets undone at the next restart. Maybe you could shed some light on this?