I just tried the new Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin.  My experience so far has been flawless.  I shut off Pidgin, ran the Windows Installer and started Pidgin back up.  Then I created an account in Pidgin’s “manage accounts” area.  I didn’t have any trouble at all.  So far, it’s worked 100%.  I really like how it doesn’t show me my friends’ screennames, but just shows me their full (First, last, sometimes middle) name.  It’s extremely clean.  Now I don’t need to log in to Facebook to talk with certain friends, and I get to use the Pidgin interface that I love.

Note: My friend’s virusscanner picked up the installer as a virus.  I used Symantec, with the latest virus definitions (October 28, 2008 rev 4) to scan the install and it didn’t detect anything wrong.