I am (probably one of the last) user of venerable fvwm 2.5.26 window manager. As such there are no gnome specific daemons running. The system does have gnome installed, as my wife uses it.

My machine is ubuntu 9.04 32bit with following sources in sources.list:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu jaunty main

When I try to run empathy (the latests one, of version 2.27.3-2ubuntu1~ppa9.04+1), I get no windows at all. I tried to cleanup the environment using following shell script, to no avail:

#!/bin/sh
cd
rm -rf .gstreamer-0.* /tmp/empathy.arie* /tmp/orbit* \
    /home/arie/.gnome2/Empathy /home/arie/.cache/Empathy 

killall gconfd-2
killall gconf-helper
killall mission-control
killall telepathy-gabble

Here are the error messages I get from terminal when starting empathy:

(empathy:30511): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: cannot register existing type `GstValve'

(empathy:30511): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed

(empathy:30511): GStreamer-CRITICAL **: gst_element_register: assertion `g_type_is_a (type, GST_TYPE_ELEMENT)' failed

(empathy:30511): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: cannot register existing type `GstRTPMux'

(empathy:30511): GStreamer-CRITICAL **: gst_element_register: assertion `g_type_is_a (type, GST_TYPE_ELEMENT)' failed

(empathy:30510): ClutterGLX-CRITICAL **: Unable to find suitable GL visual.
** (empathy:30510): DEBUG: mission_control_get_presence_actual: MC not running.
** (empathy:30510): DEBUG: mission_control_get_presence_message_actual: MC not running.
** (empathy:30510): DEBUG: _parse_parameter: param "fallback-socks5-proxies" has invalid signature
** (empathy:30510): DEBUG: mission_control_get_presence_actual: MC not running.
** (empathy:30510): DEBUG: mission_control_get_connection_status: MC not running.
** (empathy:30510): DEBUG: mission_control_get_connection_status: MC not running.
** (empathy:30510): DEBUG: mission_control_get_tpconnection: MC not running.
** (empathy:30510): DEBUG: mission_control_get_presence_actual: MC not running.
** (empathy:30510): DEBUG: mission_control_get_connection_status: MC not running.
** (empathy:30510): DEBUG: mission_control_get_connection_status: MC not running.
** (empathy:30510): DEBUG: mission_control_get_tpconnection: MC not running.