Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, I have tried that route. Installing gaim in Qtopia causes conflicts with the gaim running off the pdaXqtrom-apps cramfs file. So ipkg returns a bunch of extract errors and qpe-gaim won't run (it compains about missing x-11 libraries). After that, if I then try to launch gaim in X/Qt, it won't run either.
I'd much rather, if possible, figure out the cause of the SSL handshake problems in X/Qt. I do appreciate the reply though.