I have been using Skype on Windows since the days when it was emerging as the hottest VoIP software on the market. For years, the Windows version of Skype was an awesome tool that made international voice and video calls easy and good quality, too. But as of recent, the Skype client has become painfully difficult to use, and it has been this way for several months.

The Skype for Windows runs advertisements on almost every part of the application.

The Home view of Skype

Ads next to the chat

I’ve never had a particular issue with having advertisements running in Skype. In fact, I would prefer they stay there, so that I can enjoy using Skype for free. Unfortunately, the advertisements are broken, and the application becomes unusable, even sometimes crashing.

Skype for Windows takes advantage of Internet Explorer and Flash to display advertisements in the client. This means that in order for advertisements to work correctly, Internet Explorer and Flash need to be working correctly. Unfortunately, things are not working as desired. And I’m not the only one struggling with this issue. All one has to do to reproduce this issue is to trigger an advertisement to load. Advertisements only load sometimes. If they are successful in loading, then they’ll happily display. But sometimes you’ll see the following pop-up.

One of many errors encountered while using Skype for Windows

There are numerous reports of these issues occurring for many other users as well. And all of the responses to these issues point to some generic article describing the same solutions that do not work: update Internet Explorer, update Flash, “our engineers are looking into this” (posted over four months ago), and more. One of the community managers even had the audacity to suggest running Skype for Windows as Administrator.

The only solution that exists right now is to block apps.skype.com from having any communication through Internet Explorer’s Internet Options. It’s unbelievable that a product which used to be the hottest VoIP app on the market has become unusable due to issues that are not being fixed.

To the developers of Skype: please do something about Skype for Windows before you start losing your users and what once was an excellent product.