So, a couple of days ago, AOL started blocking older versions of the ICQ protocol.  I noticed this yesterday when my Carrier (the multi-IM client formerly known as FunPidgin, a branch of Pidgin) started telling me I was using too old of a version of my client, to please upgrade.  Now, all things said, this is kind of a minor thing . . .  I so rarely ever communicate via ICQ with anyone anymore, but I’ve had an ICQ number longer than any other IM identity, and what’s important, dammit, is that the potential for communication via ICQ is there.

I was still running Carrier 2.5.0, and I discovered today that 2.5.4 was available.  I upgraded, hoping that would fix it.  Nope.  I searched in vain online for information on this, news, fixes, newer code from a repository – something.  I found a slashdot article about the ICQ version change thing, which talked about a lot of IM client which I don’t use, and Pidgin’s site says that some folks in some areas were having issues with ICQ, and to just upgrade to 2.5.5, and that pretty much fixed it.

So, after some experimentation and fiddling around, if you want to fix your Carrier 2.5.4 to work with ICQ again . . . simply get the Pidgin 2.5.5 client, install it somewhere (another machine or something – I used a virtual machine, thank you VMWare) where it won’t muck with your main Carrier install, and them simply grab the liboscar.dll from the new Pidgin 2.5.5 install and replace the liboscar.dll in your Carrier install with it.  Start up Carrier and re-enable ICQ, and things should be fine again.