I paid the shareware fee for Proteus because it used to be much better than Adium on all sorts of levels - nicer interface, more stable. Alas, I cannot connect with Proteus anymore - I am behind a firewall and something must have changed but Proteus tech support has not responded to my pleas - and so I had to turn to Adium which connects fine. In addition Adium has OTR and since I am in an organisation which has a policy allowing them to monitor IM conversations I am happier with Adium. Adium has also improved a great deal. I am hoping Proteus resolves some of its problems so I can go back to it because it was a nice programme - stable with a solid feature set.