Skype not working all of a sudden
 

I have Skype on my desktop, worked fine until now. Does not sign in, only the arrows going round and round forever. Cannot cut it off from "quit" as before. Does not respond in any way. What should one do? Tried to reinstall, no use. My distro is Ubuntu 11.10. Have had Ubuntu for some two years now, still feel like a newbie...

Thats just how Skype behaves. As it wants. Give it some time, it might work eventually.

PS. Reinstalling will probably not help. Thats because the issue might be in the user data ($HOME/.Skype) folder that is not removed if the package is uninstalled (BTW this is true for any package, removing/reinstalling them will not touch the user's settings, stored n the home folder). So, renaming/deleting that folder will effectively reset Skype.

Found the folder, put it in the vastebin, deleted, reinstalled Skype. Result: malfunction as before. Could use some more advice, anyone?

Go over to the Skype forums and ask there. Maybe they know better.

Another thing to try is to download the static version of Skype, unpack it somewhere and launch the skype executable from that folder.

OK, will try that. I have this same Skype installed on my laptop, when I go to Options-Advanced it says "Use port 37249 for incoming connections", when this desktop computer says "Use port 0 for incoming connections". Is there something peculiar about that?

I have 6276 for incoming connections. It is probably random. But lower than 1000 ports can be used only with root access AFAIK.
I suppose you could put anything there above 10000.

I found out that (for some reason) pulseaudio was installed causing a conflict with ALSAplayer. Removing pulseaudio got Skype (and everything else that was failing, too) working again with no problem whatsoever. I'm sorry to say, but I really think that this sound issue should be solved once and for all. Cannot use pulseaudio with Skype when I found it completely impossible to make the sound come out in a hearable manner...

PulseAudio is the default sound system (actually sound server) in Ubuntu for a long time. It runs on top of ALSA (which in fact manages the audio cards).

Skype works very well with PulseAudio on Debian at least (used it with bluetooth handsfree). Maybe its some Ubuntu related issue (those are many...).