Recently active topics in I want Sandy tagged with direct message

I've tried to get Twitter and Sandy to play nice together, but it's just not happening. I went through the guide to making this happen, almost no success.

I can get Sandy to follow me and me to follow her. I got the confirmation Tweet very quickly. I get the test Tweets almost instantly. But that is where things end.

I've tried copy and paste-ing the examples. All I'm seeing is that my message was sent when I use Pidgin from my GTalk account. But when I send the same message from the Twitter website I am told that the user doesn't exist.

Um, what? I don't think I can follow someone who doesn't exist.

There are no replies and no direct messages from Sandy on the Twitter site.

I really don't know what else to tell you so that I can have this working right, but I'll be happy to answer any questions that could help lead to the solution.