I'm using 0.80 in dutch, mainly (and unfortunately) with MSN)
There are (as far as I understand) five different names a contact can have:
email-address name (e.g. blabla@hotmail.com)
Alias (whatever that is, or however to put it)
Name (first/last - as in addressbook)
Nickname (as in addressbook)
Display name (name you can give yourself in preferences)
Somehow I don't succeed in letting my contacts be shown by this last 'display name' (while this is usually the most informative of those five). I believe 0.77 did it right...
What to do? (already tried too long and searched over this forum carefully)
solution so far: in preferences > layout - list layout > customize > show - (idle) status
Har Har, it was 'inactive time' before... not really intuitive but finally
still I haven't succeeded in showing only the displayname...