Attached below is a patch stolen from opensuse to add support for storing the account passwords in the login keyring in gnome-keyring instead of in plaintext in accounts.xml
Created attachment 221527 [details, diff] Use gnome-keyring to store patches Extracted from pidgin-2.6.6-3.1.src.rpm from the suse repos (lost the link to them :/)
Nirbheek, upstream states (see URL) that this patch has known problems and since it'll appear in pidgin-3.0 I guess it's better to resolve this issue as upstream. Nevertheless thank you for taking time and opening this report. Now we know what people need and probably somebody else finds this report useful.