THE ANSWER: iChat fails to start, Error -7 & -8 etc - what worked for me!

Question

Like many of you, I have been struggling to get iChat to work reliably. I initiate a chat, my daughter responds, it tells me the iChat is connecting, but then the dreaded error message appears. I tried all the tips given here, checked that I had opened the appropriate ports in my Router's firewall, set the QT streaming speed, ploughed through Ralph's website, all to little avail, except for the really useful find of the test "buddies" appleu3test01/02/03 (AIM). What was frustrating was that it would sometimes work, but when it wasn't working, it wouldn't work at all (ie multiple tries all failed). I eventually found a post by an unsung hero (for me!) called Steven C Ross, posted 11th Nov, suggesting I turn off Internet Sharing. Bingo! iChat works again!! I usually have sharing on to allow my Powerbook to connect wirelessly; but not always, hence the frustration that iChat sometimes worked ok for an unknown reason!!
I think this tip of Steven's deserves a lot more publicity, hence this post.
Thanks, Steven.
NB I am using Leopard on a new Intel iMac; don't know whether it applies to 10.4 but worth a try!

Answer 1

This process worked for me on a new Mac Pro (early 2014) to get Windows 8.1 (not 8.0) installed, although I did make one slight change to the process: instead of following your advice at the point: "Restart and follow instructions as before", I instead restarted and used the windows partitioner dialog to 1) delete the bootcamp partition, and 2) create a new partition that was slightly smaller than the remaining available space (by about 1GB). The installer said it might need to create an additional small partition (which it did). I continued with the rest of the install process as you describe above. (Yes, it did take a long time to get past the "almost ready" part.)
Thank you very much for your post!