Hi Matt, could you elaborate a bit more for the chat daemon failing problem that you were encounting? Which Moodle version you were using and did you use the original chat module came with Moodle? Also did you try any of the jabber servers (see http://www.jabber.org/software/servers.shtml) as an external tool as an alternative solution to replace Moodle's chat module? Many thanks!
We might be testing the PHPOPenChat that you mentioned, and will keep everyone posted.