In a fresh Ubuntu install from a bootable pendrive or a CD drive the empathy IM application crashes on startup. I faced problems in each installation and after a lot of trial & error methods I found out how to make empathy stable without any technical knowledge (no Terminal).

I just tried this:

Start empathy from the menu somehow and quickly click on the “view” option and disable the offline contacts

But this solves my problem until I reboot. After rebooting it resets itself.

While running from terminal it shows me
segmentation fault

I tried this link also but not helpful yet.

sysinfo :

Release : Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric)

 GNOME  :  2.32.1 (Ubuntu 2011-04-14)

Kernel  : 3.0.0-13-generic (#22-Ubuntu SMP Wed Nov 2 13:25:36 UTC 2011)