Pidgin does not connect

[HermanAA]

Pidgin (chat program) has been working for many months.
Now it tries to connect (but never gets connected)
I have been doing floppy-drive install and changed boot-options (I
already changed them back).
I also changed added a line to fstab. I have floppy0 access.

Now Pidgin tries to connect (but never gets connected).
I UNinstalled Pidgin, re-installed it. After several tried it was
working.
That was yesterday. This morning it is back to the old problem:
Pidgin tries to connect (but never gets connected).

Is there an easy solution?
Where do I look?
I use Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit.

Herman in Philippines.