Steve... there was a "Steve" in the chat room earlier in the day -- wasn't that you?

In any case, I have no explanations for why you failed to get in. On my system during the chat last night it appeared as though there was a dialog between my PC and Gabbly at least once a second, maybe shorter... that's a lot of bandwidth and it requires a fair amount of processing power to keep up. There are so many variables... connection type/speed (eg, dsl, cable, dial-up, etc.), OS (eg, WinXP, Linux, Mac, etc.), Browser (eg, Firefox, IE, Opera, etc.)... and then there are the revisions levels of each, your security settings, cpu speed, etc., etc., etc.! Steve, if you and DwarvenChef can provide some of the details of your configurations, we might be able to sort out some of the gotchas.

Nonetheless, we did hold a chat last night and at one point there was 7-8 people concurrently active. (On a normal chat night the numbers range between 5-15.) Several of last night's participants were on dial-up connections and at least one (uclicker) had significant difficulty keeping connected to the chat. I also noticed several posts in the chat did not make sense... I assume that's because an occasional message was getting lost, but there's no way of proving that.

Gabbly is a bare-bones chat... no frills and few amenities. And at the moment, it's the only game in town.