I'm running on Ubuntu 13.10, and using Google Chrome 64 bit. Because Google Talk wouldn't work, I uninstalled the Talk Plugin to see if that changed anything, but no cigar. Here's an image that'll give you a better idea than I would.
On Chromium it worked perfectly, but not on Chrome itself.
I am facing exactly the same problem. After some fiddling around, now I seem to have reached an even worse situation where after every few seconds I get asked to install the Hangouts plugin. I've done this repeatedly but to no avail.
I think this should now be fixed. I checked in about:plugins in Firefox. The google-talkplugin was disabled for some reason. I went to plugins and set this to "Always Activate", now Google talk works properly.