i've had my buddy list randomly dissappear before in Aim . . . and also in MSN . . . it seems the servers occasionaly loose track of users properties when they log on, almost as thought not all your user data gets sent to them when you sign on . . then when you sign off, the data of no users existing gets sent back to the server (or has in my case) and voila, bye by contacts . . what a pain . . .