It mostly seems to happen when there's another IM chat going on, and perhaps also related to a long period between replies. e.g. I have a brief chat with someone who's on the phone. 5 minutes later I start another chat. First buddy gets off the phone and IMs me, but it shows up on Skype and does not hit Adium.

Hit +3 by mistake this morning and got a window showing groups with contacts in them. Apparently Skype does calls them Lists. If you right-click on a contact in Skype (5.7.0.1037 for Mac) you have the option to "Add to list" which moves them from "Ungrouped Contacts" to the selected group. There's a 'Create list' option in this bubble/window, but apparently no way to delete a list.

Found group info (many, many, many instances of it) in ~user/library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/libpurple/blist.xml Stopped Adium, moved the file out of the directory, restarted Adium. Usernames all came up in one group (Buddies) with all references to other groups gone. The newly generated blist.xml is ~7 kbytes. The old one was 3 megabytes(!)

Where are the groups actually stored? Is there something that Skype saves which is overwriting local changes after they are made? There are two groups which I no longer want or need. I've removed them about six times and they keep coming back on a restart. At this point, I'd be happy getting rid of groups altogether if it would give me a single instance per contact in the contact list.

Groups, groups, groups. This must be tiring for you. So everyone is a permanent member of both 'Skype' and 'Buddies' I long ago gave up trying to eliminate those groups, so I collapse them in the Contact List window.

But - I've got a couple of contacts who are members of two other groups that I created. No matter how many times I 'Get Info' and remove them from one group, the next time I start Adium, they are back in both groups again. Then there are the groups I created that I no longer need and that I can't delete (they come back too.)

Any hints?

--thx