This is likely an upstream bug, and its not really version specific. Its been happening for some time now, many version and remains with latest, 4.0.0-r1. When ever I reboot my system and log in for the first time, when ekiga starts it wipes out the ~/.config/ekiga.conf config file entirely. Erases all settings and reverts it back to a default config file. I think this might happen on log out/in, but I rarely do that. Mostly only do that on occasion when I reboot my desktop. Its quite annoying, and I ended up setting a attribute so the file could not be modified, which is not ideal. But does prevent the file from being overwritten and my settings wiped out.
I encountered this bug too and, after reading this bug report, looked into it a bit from the user perspective. The problem seems to be, that the account information is written as plain text, producing corrupt xml if you use special characters in your account name, passwords etc. I created an upstream bug report: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721198
Upstream just pointed out the possibility to use gconf instead of the ekiga.conf. That does indeed fix the problem. But the gconf USE-flag is disabled by default. Maybe we should change that or even entirely remove it.
My desktop is KDE not Gnome, and I do not use gconf though its installed for GnuCash. Its been happening for some time, and is not necessarily specific to failure to parse XML. It overwrites the file, I used extended attributes at times to make it read only and not allow anything to overwrite it. That was the only way to avoid this issue. Short of using gconf.
Not sure if we can do anything more than enabling gconf USE by default until upstream fixes the issue :/
[master d9cfcd8] net-voip/ekiga: Disable all experimental stuff as upstream doesn't take care of it at all and is too buggy (and also obsolete, https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689301), gconf support is needed always until next major version bump (#448698), this will need to be rebuilt with opal/plib major bumps (#464864), fix crashes on clear call history (#499208 by Philipp Leonhardt). 2 files changed, 153 insertions(+) create mode 100644 net-voip/ekiga/ekiga-4.0.1-r1.ebuild create mode 100644 net-voip/ekiga/files/ekiga-4.0.1-crash-clear.patch
