FYI, many programs are not coded the way they should have been, and consequently don't work correctly simply by moving to a newer OS. You can't assume that the change should come on the Vista side for Skype to work; it may very well be a problem in Skype's code.
And blaming Vista is often flat out inaccurate. Case in point...
"on one machine i couldn't get skype to install at all (error: not a valid Win32 application). on my laptop however, it would install but couldn't get the sound to work, problem rectified by reverting to an OLDER ac'97 driver"
You logically have admitted the first machine, there's something different about it from others, which doesn't point to Vista necessarily. In fact, since Vista is on both machines, and both machines exhibit different behaviors, it lends more to the fact that Vista isn't the culprit in either one.
The other points to an issue with your AC97 sound drivers, which is absolutely not the fault of Vista. It's a fault with your driver manufacturer that could just as easily happen in XP, or 2000, etc.
And once again, I googled to see if Vista and Skype work together, and there are a whole lot of people able to run it fine, save some people who needed to change their firewall config, but that is the burden of running firewalls. You can't single out Vista for that. I'm sure config changes would be necessary for other firewalls like Zonealarm, too.
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