[Grrr]

Seems the past week or 2 I have been having iChat problems. I often send picts in the chat window, jpg's or gifs etc (So they appear in the chat window) And they nearly always refuse to go through now, causing an error. On the rare occasion they do go through, it often causes text transmission problems, and one user will stop receiving messages until iChat is restarted.
Quite often, even without sending picts, text suddenly stops reaching the end user. or i stop getting it from them. Always a big pain in the ass, as you are never quite sure if they have gone for a dump or something with no warning.. So you wait and wait and wait, and eventually find out that it wasn't working, and they were typing away all along.
Does sound a lot like a firewall problem, yet no firewall changes have been made recently, and also there are at least 3 other iChat that I know of that have had exactly this same problem recently.
Someone chucked a spanner in the AIM works? Just iChat or is it AIM users too I wonder?
Any input much appreciated

[plugh]

I get the same problem if trying to paste pictures in the iChat IM window, it seems to fix itself sporadically when I turn off the Panther Firewall. I've tried opening all the iChat and AIM port numbers i can find, but still no success with the firewall turned on. Have also noticed that after a pasted picture has "gone missing" that I have to restart the iChat client to get the IM window to work again.