I was updating my system when I noticed that my gaim no longer was using my gtk2 theme. Upon further inspection and remerging, the ebuild was no longer building using gtk-2 but gtk-1.4 instead. I have the same cflags (gtk2, gnome) that made 0.5.7 build with gtk2 support.
support for GTK2 in 0.58.x is horrible the gaim dev's themselves have admitted this ... 0.58.x was not meant to use GTK2 if you want GTK2, emerge gaim-cvs (which is 0.60 cvs checkout) ... the 0.60.x release is meant to be used with GTK2