- How can I make Gaim stop auto-hiding its conversation windows?
You have loaded a plugin to make it do this. The only one that I recall us distributing iconifies the windows when you are away, but others have been written to hide them at other times.
- How can I make Gaim stop auto-toping its dialogs and windows?
Each of the 2.0.0 beta releases of gaim has reduced the number of dialogs and windows that are created without direct user intervention. That being said, gaim still does not make any effort to place new windows at any given level. Users complaining of this problem are almost always Windows or Metacity users. Users of other window managers have a much lower incidence of annoyance by gaim's window placement, even once you consider the difference in user base. This should tell you something.
- How can I make Gaim stop stealing the focus all the time?
When is it "stealing" your focus? While some versions of gaim have had bugs that cause it to do so, most of not all of these have been resolved. The one exception is related to the previous question. Some window managers give focus by default to newly created windows all the time. We feel that gaim should leave decisions about when gaim gets focus to the window manager. If you dislike your window manager's decisions in this matter, it is not our fault.
Gaim is one of the very few programs that is graphical and yet responds to network events. One of the few other commonly used examples of such programs are email programs. Because some events are initiated by others, such as new conversations or new mail notifications, gaim is faced with a situation that some window manager developers never consider: how to handle this in the UI. Our decision has been to (slowly) reduce the incidence of dialogs being created without your direct intervention. For that reason the new mail notification and many of the error dialogs have been moved to the buddy list and to the conversation backlogs. For the same reason we introduced extended queueing options, allowing you to queue new conversations to the buddy list, so that they do not "pop up." I suspect that many if not all of your issues with gaim either have already been solved if you upgrade to 2.0.0 beta6, or would go away if you did not use metacity (gnome's default window manager), or both.