Skype Not Responding

Oh dear, after recent updates to Skype for Windows, it stops working and shows “Not Responding” in its window title bar. This seems to be happening since version 7 updates of Skype.

I’ve seen this on several, otherwise stable, Windows 7 systems – and, despite re-installing, cleaning up etc, it is either intermittently flaky or just stops working.

It seems to be bound up with Skype’s Home Page, and possibly its adverts, which used Internet Explorer components to serve it up.

My current solution to this is to un-install Skype, reboot and then install version 6. This can be found in several places on-line, but some of the sites might carry some unwanted cargo – so I’ve put a clean, tested instance of Skype 6.18.0.106 here: Dropbox – Skype 6.

Watch out for the tick boxes that will install Bing etc. While it might perpetually search for the home page it doesn’t seem to go into “Not Responding” mode, I just get it to show the call phone or group contacts pane instead.

Once installed go to Tools,Options,Advanced settings,Automatic updates and disable automatic updates:

You will also need to keep a close eye on Windows Update. An update to Skype version 7.0 will probably be automatically selected as an Important update – I wonder why! You can de-select the update (un-tick it) and stop it returning by right-clicking on it and selecting Hide update: