I got the following the debian bts:

Package: gossip
Version: 0.24-2
Severity: minor

With the following setup with two accounts
 * one account telepathy-salut
 * one account telepathy-gabble
and with network manager not running at all on the system, gossip
will on startup try to connect to both accounts, of which the
salut one of course always succeeds. But the gabble one doesn't
when I'm offline, and gossip keeps trying and re-displays the
"connection refused" message approximately every 20 seconds which
is quite annoying if you try to use it locally with salut.

[when network manager is running it shows being offline in this
network here, and thus gossip never connects, but also doesn't
try to re-connect over and over when I manually connect and the
gabble account fails to connect]

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: powerpc (ppc)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-rc1-g79e90214-dirty (PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages gossip depends on:
ii  gossip-common             0.24-2         friendly Jabber client for GNOME -
ii  libaspell15               0.60.5-1       GNU Aspell spell-checker runtime l
ii  libc6                     2.6~20070518-1 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libdbus-1-3               1.0.2-5        simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2          0.73-2         simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libgconf2-4               2.18.0.1-3     GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libglade2-0               1:2.6.0-4      library to load .glade files at ru
ii  libglib2.0-0              2.12.12-1      The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnome2-0               2.18.0-4       The GNOME 2 library - runtime file
ii  libgnomeui-0              2.18.1-2       The GNOME 2 libraries (User Interf
ii  libgnomevfs2-0            1:2.18.1-1     GNOME Virtual File System (runtime
ii  libgtk2.0-0               2.10.12-2      The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libloudmouth1-0           1.2.1-1        Lightweight C Jabber library
ii  libnotify1 [libnotify1-gt 0.4.4-3        sends desktop notifications to a n
ii  libpanel-applet2-0        2.18.1-2       library for GNOME 2 panel applets
ii  libpango1.0-0             1.16.4-1       Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libtelepathy2             0.0.54-1       Telepathy framework - GLib library
ii  libx11-6                  2:1.1.1-1      X11 client-side library
ii  libxml2                   2.6.28.dfsg-1  GNOME XML library
ii  libxss1                   1:1.1.2-1      X11 Screen Saver extension library

Versions of packages gossip recommends:
ii  iso-codes                     1.0a-1     ISO language, territory, currency 

-- no debconf information