verichat, was awsome when it worked... it still works sometimes only its out of biz now
palringo on the other hand is free and works great ...which was never really a option previously... but is in beta... and slick is decent ... looks really cheap to me tho for some reason... but its free too and in beta. i haven't used slick that much tho because i'm so satisfied with palringo. and you can remove it off the today screen by deleting the todayicon.dll and the update.dll, but without the update.dll the software won't automatically update... so you might wanna just move the update.dll somewhere else until you need it