ICQ and I have a long love/hate history... I've tried Trillian - loved it/hated it/deleted it... I've gone back and forth and finally downloaded the new Lite ICQ version, which has been much better.
We use Yahoo! for intra-office type stuff and I love it SOOOOO much better than ICQ - wish it were used more in the industry. My kids use MSN/AIM and I really like a lot of the features there as well.
One more thing: Funbrunette - do you have Norton Internet Security? Before blaming any other program, I would check into it possibly being because of Symantec. After blaming my DSL, changing to cable and then blaming them (for connectivity issues), and changing email clients, IM clients and other various programs - on a whim I shut down Norton to see what would happen. Instantly my connection "came back" after 5 hours of cussing/screaming/yelling @ the PC and customer service. It was Norton.
I removed that piece of crap (that I had trusted for YEARS) from my PC and started using something new. So far, no issues - no problems - no crashing PC - no email issues - no lost emails - and I haven't had to reboot in days. I was rebooting several times/day with Norton.
