IChat used to work great but recently....

Question

Hello all,
I have been using iChat since the day it came out, several years ago, and it has served me wonderfully well. I have loved it for communicating with family all over the world as well for work. Essentially, it has worked without a hitch for years. HOWEVER, recently it has been failing to connect with regularity and this is beginning to try may patience.
I am based in Japan and I have been having difficulty connecting with people in this country, UK and Australia. Sometimes, I can get through with persistence, sometimes not.
Sometimes it is as simple as a restart of iChat, sometimes it takes a reboot and sometimes dumping the iChat related plist files has worked BUT not always.
Thanks to Ralph Johns for his comprehensive site, I have made sure that all parties have relevant port settings on their Macs and routers.
I am beginning to wonder what else there is we can do.
Usually, the problem is recorded as a -20 error but of late has mainly been -8 errors. All users have high speed broadband connections and although use them wirelessly, have also tried connecting directly.
As said before, it used to work without a hitch for years.
One strange thing that has appeared my end, is the local iChat window displays a plain white band across the top where the connection details used to be, as it is trying to connect, and only rings once where it used to ring continuously until the connection was made.
Have been thinking that recent 'fixes' to QT and Safari may be the route of the problems but have run out of ideas of things to try, to sort it out.
The switchers who I convinced to get Macs on the strength of iChat communication capabilities, are now calling me names! Any help would be very much appreciated. Many thanks.

Answer 1

Ralph Johns (UK) wrote:
Boot Camp in itself should not be an issue in itself
Sorry maybe I wasn't clear. The MacBookPro is running Tiger and just has windows on the other partition. I just wondered whether that had something to do with the errors.
Using AIM 6.5 in the Window install may be as lots of people have problems with this. (AIM in fact says it does not work but about 30% say they can get it to work)
I don't think AIM is being used. I believe they have a mac ID and only attempt to use iChat with Tiger. They were/are a windows switcher and did so primarily to use iChat. As stated everything used to work really well between all parties until about the beginning of the year. (related to updates perhaps?). These issues are beginning to given them serious doubts.
Can you go to System Preferences > Software Update and Installed Updates > Open as Log Button and Copy and Paste it here ?
Personally, I never use Systems Update. I always, repair permissions, download the individual installers, then repair permissions again. In the past I have explained to the other users that this is the safest way to update, so they may have been doing the same thing. Certainly, there are no log details recorded my end in 'Log Button
Can you do the same for each end so we can see if there is a common factor ?
I will ask them to check, but this may not be possible until the weekend.
Thanks for your suggestions.