I'm thinking you're ahead on points, sarettah.
Trev...do to the number of friends and family I have spread out over various messenger programs, I tried Trillian for about an hour, too. Of course, this was on the old machine. It came with great smilies that my friend in Yahoo couldn't see and crashed three times during one conversation with her. Being that she has a right lively vocabulary and a short fuse, I thought it best to bag the Trillian and go back to just using each individual program when I have time to talk to people.
That's the other thing against Trillian. I don't want to sit here with my day shot full of holes because everybody I know wants to talk at once. I turned on AIM earlier to see how my two newbies were doing and immediately three screens lit up...one from a friend I hadn't spoken to in a long time, so he had to go to the top of the "attention" list. (Not Dom, of course. Two sort of pre-newbies.)