pidgin buddy list has gone invisible

Today while using pidgin, the buddy list vanished from the screen. All that was left was a thin white stripe on the leftmost side of the window - the rest of the window has entirely vanished from the screen.

If I press alt-space, I can move the invisible window around on the screen or move it to a different workspace, but nothing I do will make the window reappear - it remains invisible, and so I am unable to access the buddy list.

If someone messages me or logs on, I can click the popup notification and talk to that person (the chat window opens fine and works fine). But there doesn't seem to be any way to access the buddy list.

I tried restarting my computer; that didn't have any affect. I tried reinstalling pidgin in the package manager; the problem still persists. Tried removing the package from the system and re-installing it, and the problem still continues.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: pidgin 1:2.10.3-0ubuntu1.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-36.57-generic 3.2.35
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-36-generic i686
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu17.1
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Jan 25 13:21:35 2013
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release i386 (20120423)
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: pidgin
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)