As much as I hate it, QQ is a bit of a must have in China as most Chinese people don’t use Facebook or MSN to communicate online. However, rather than installing and running yet another IM application on my computer, I realised that Pidgin provides fairly good support for the QQ protocol – which means that I can access all my IM services from one application (Facebook, XiaoNei, Pidgin, Gmail, Hotmail, QQ) hence speeding up my computer a bit. In fact, the current Linux version of QQ lacks a lot of features, is fairly buggy and doesn’t integrate well with GNOME – so it’s probably better to go down the Pidgin route anyway.
After using QQ under Pidgin for a while, I found that sometimes there would be problems on login and that Pidgin would sometimes automatically disable QQ after a number of failed login attempts. It turns out that this can be easily fixed by selecting “Manage Accounts” and then “Modify” for the QQ account. 
In the advanced settings tab, make sure that QQ2008 is selected (the default may well be QQ2005). It seems that this later version is more stable and login should no longer be a problem.
