Empathy and Samba

I installed Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, on 2 boxes yesterday. One is on my wife's ThinkPad as dual boot. It occupies 6GB of disk and works as a charm. Another one on my existing Ubuntu 9.04's partition and reuse my /home file system. I had at least two problem when I began to use my new Ubuntu.

The first problem is from Empathy, the substitution Pidgin as an IM client. I got "Network error" when I tried to login my MSN account. I solved this issue by

 killall telepathy-butterfly  

but still feel uncomfortable with its user interface. Maybe I should give Emesene a go or stick with Pidgin.

Another problem is I could not mount my NAS using SMB/CIFS. I got a message box says

Unable to mount location
DBus error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus)

It turned to be a keyring related defect. My workaround is deleting all the smb entries in Password: default group in Passwords and Encryption Keys.

In my case, it's not a fresh install or an upgrade. Maybe that's the root of the 2 problems I encountered. To be a good trouble shooter, you have to be a good trouble maker.