5
Don't know if you would be willing to update, but the newest version of XOOPS has a new PM function, in fact I think it is related to their extended profiles modules as these new features appear across the site.
But with the latest XOOPS you click on List, a window pops up and you get all of the members names in alphabetical order, you can sort the list further by choosing to see just a certain group of users e.g. Moderators or you can sort the list by user rank, which again would allow you to only display moderators or webmasters or whatever, I actually think the ability to search by group is fine, but then I do have a seperate user group for my moderators, so the ranking option is not really useful on my site. Anyway, you click refresh and you see all members which are moderators etc.
If you don't want to go through the list of users or try to sort by rank or group, instead of clicking List in the PM screen, just click on search you can type the display name into this field and press search; this says there is one user, click on Add this gets added to the PM and you can continue with the PM as you would before hand.
Dave