It's time for some More Pidgin Bashing after the original Pidgin bashing.
Those who are computer programmer types might notice that the time displayed comes out to 4,294,967,280 seconds, which is suspiciously close to 4,294,967,295 seconds. Even further, they might point out that Pidgin probably set the login time to -1, which when taken as an unsigned 32-bit number, comes out to 4,294,967,295 seconds.
This doesn't exactly absolve Pidgin, though. Apparently it's using -1 to indicate that it doesn't know how long someone has been logged in. Not necessarily a bad idea.
Then going and using the value as an unsigned value and not checking for this special value, on the other hand...
Now, this *is* a problem
This is a real bug in the software, which should be fixed.
Have you filed a bug report?
It's already been reported
Someone else has already reported it, it's Ticket #1754. Unfortunately they seem to think it's a time-zone problem (rather than a signed versus unsigned problem) so maybe I'll have to create an account and point that out.
FWIW
For what it's worth, I noticed Ticket #698 seems to be on the right track.
Only half a year later.