This morning I updated from the preview version (which was in turn updated from GAIM) to the newly released Pidgin. I also added the encryption plugins.
Everything worked ok for about an hour, then pidgin unexpectedly froze. I terminated it and then restarted it, and 5 seconds after the chat dialog boxes returned (I have it configured for 3 IRC channels in tabs via SSL) it froze again.
Further investigation has determined that as soon as I start pidgin it starts grabbing memory and pegging 1 core of my cpu until it grabs approximately 1200MB at which time windows kills the process.
I'm going to try a new installation, but I thought I would report the issue here as well.
-Mike