FYI, in case anybody reads this. My problem stemmed from the fact that I had an AIM account running through Apple's .mac. According to other sources AIM does not play welll with others and does not support all the function of other crosswalk systems which try to connect to AIM gateways. This also makes sense since I tried going to the AIM gateway though my jabbber accounts and received a similar error.
I created an AIM account and all works as it should.