I'd say look towards miranda first. It's a very basic IM program.

OK, I finally did that -- downloaded and installed Miranda.

Now what do I do with it?

It's probably that I'm just not smart enough to figure out the obvious... but when I bring up Miranda, all I get is a blank box that doesn't appear to let me go online, nor does it show my ICQ contact list.

I had hoped that it would be as transparent a change as when I went from IE to FireFox.

tanstaafl.