Skype Issues Instructions On How To Fix Mac Connectivity Issues [If You've Been Having Trouble Getting Skype To Work With Your Mac, There's A Fix For That]

Posted on TFTS by Steve Anderson on Thursday, 26. May 2011 under: Computers & Computing, Net Resources, PCs, Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets

So it’s a little on the ironic side–or maybe the downright bone-chilling side, depending on how you look at it–that only a couple weeks after Microsoft buys Skype, reports of it not working well with Macs emerges. But recently, Skype users running Mac OS X reported some troubles not only getting connected but staying connected, and if you’re one of those folks, a solution has emerged.

The word from Skype is surprisingly simple, actually, and is a four-part solution that shouldn’t actually take you too long to try out. What you’ll want to do here is quit Skype, and then navigate yourself over to ~/Library/Application Support/Skype/, where ~ is to your Home directory. Then you’ll want to find and delete the file named “shared.xml”, and finally, launch Skype again.

Skype claims that doing this will cause the program to create a new version of the XML file in question, and upon doing so, you’ll no longer have the connection problems you once did. Oddly enough, they also don’t know what caused the problem in the first place, nor why deleting one file brings everything back up to normal operations. And those using Skype on Android or even iOS devices didn’t have any problems, at last report, either, so what was it about Macs that brought the whole system down around its own head?

No one knows, and any suggestion seems kind of weak in the face of the rather bizarre evidence. It seems like precious little more than “one of those things” that seem to happen to computers every so often that have no explanation more than “they just happen”. A real HAL 9000 sort of moment, if you will.

But if you’ve got any guesses behind what happened to Skype for Mac, well, we’ve got a comments section all warmed up and waiting. So head on down and hit us up with your thoughts on this one!

Francis Buttle
It worked for me! Thanks for the story.
Ananth
Yes, it works :-) Thanks
Nadia
Didn’t work for me :(
Tom
Microsoft hasn’t actually bought Skype yet, the deal is still in progress but thanks, this works
Steve
Thanks worked for me and saved me from doing something stupid with my Mac
LK
funnily enough, MSM is working fine. Even a sniff of microsoft around a previously glorious independent product sends it spiralling into retardedness…
http://nexus404.com/Blog Steve Andersen
Glad to hear it worked for most all of you–seems that the error was a pretty temporary thing in its own right. Weird thing was it was part of a string of errors that cropped up yesterday. But stick around, because when problems like this crop up, we love finding you guys answers.
ladybear
I can’t find the file they mention ‘~/Library/Application Support/Skype/,’ anywhere, only the skype application itself, in the applications folder.
using 10.6.7
haven’t noticed any skype problems, maybe this version of mac doesn’t have them, or am I Ok because I didn’t download the latest version of skype?