can you hear me now?
my little aim bot written with Net::AIM stops being able to send messages after some number of hours of operation, and there's no indication why. the bot is still connected, still gets (and responds to) keep-alive requests from the server, can receive messages, and doesn't get error messages when sending messages, but the messages don't go through. very annoying. i fixed the Net::AIM code to roll over sequence ids properly, but that doesn't appear to be the problem (and i don't think that event has ever even been reached).
the yahoo and icq bots don't appear to have this problem.
I noticed it was going quiet, switched to YIM to see whether that was still working, said "hey, *nv*s*bl* (a word you don't want near Yahoo in your blog, believe me) mode, and offline messages when I come back, this is way better" and never went back to AIM.
From what little I've read about AIM bots, it's because AOL hates you, and does everything it can to make you disappear. Could it be as simpleminded as just noticing that your bot talks, but nobody ever replies? You could set up another bot that just replies to a notification every few minutes.