D-Bus error trying to run gaim AND how do i ensure better upgrades?

[tom arnall <kloro2006@gmail.com>]

i did an upgrade of my testing system recently and afterwards have found a 
nubmer of problems on my system. the most recent is that i can't run gaim 
properly. when i try to, the screen appears momentarily and then goes away, 
leaving the folowing error message in the console.


   D-Bus library appears to be incorrectly set up; failed to read 
   machine uuid: Failed to open "/var/lib/dbus/machine-id": No such 
   file or directory 
   See the manual page for dbus-uuidgen to correct this issue.
   Continuing with a bogus made-up machine UUID, which may cause 
   problems.gaim: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libpangocairo-1.0.so.0:\
   undefined symbol: cairo_scaled_font_get_font_options
   
i had some problems earlier with gaim and dealt with them by copying the 
config file from the root user to my user's directory, but the D-Bus error is 
new and started when i reinstalled gaim to deal with some other problems. 

What is the D-Bus error about?

Also, how can i lessen my chances of breaking things when i upgrade. (i have 
both testing and stable addresses in my sources.list file)