I was having multitudes of problems running on 64bit myself, and thanks to
the wonderful advice of the people here, I dropped down to 32bit and things
have gone pretty smoothly ever since.

Speaking of Skype...I was considering purchasing this software as well and
have not done so as of yet because I am not familiar with whether or not it
is installable on Ubuntu7.10. I know some programs can be installed with
WINE, yet others just cr*p out on you when you are installing them that way
and say it can't be installed.