Skype crashed today? Here’s a fix

Many Ubuntu users have, in the last 24 hours, been experiencing bizarre crash issues with VoIP service Skype whereby the application randomly crashes then fails to start again.

Skype themselves have seemingly acknowledged there is a problem via twitter.
Skype’s not quite the same since Microsoft bought it, eh? Joking aside, reader Nana Ayeh was one of those affected: -
“Something weird happened today: at some time Skype crashed and wouldn’t launch again. Trying to launch it in terminal simply outputs ‘Aborted’ and nothing else. After some googling I discovered that not only I have this problem so I decided to share a tip for other users affected.
Some people suggested uninstalling Skype, and completely deleting the ~/.Skype dir before installing it again but there’s actually one file that’s somehow causing problems: shared.xml.”

So how to fix?

Deleting/renaming the file in question seems to get things running again:

• mv ~/.Skype/shared.xml ~/.Skype/shared~.xml

After that one will need to re-enter Skype password upon login.

By Joey Sneddon, Published May 26, 2011