After 10.5.8, Skype is causes huge slowdown of my MBA

Question

I practically cannot use Skype any more after updating to 10.5.8 on my 1.6Ghz MBA. If I start up Skype, the icon will be bouncing away for a good 5 minutes before it will launch, and while it is launching, nothing else on the MBA works. Everything else freezes. Once Skype (latest version) is logged in, the MBA runs real slow and I get the spinning ball very frequently for just simple stuff like writing an email or clicking on a Safari link. Everything slows down tremendously. the moment, I quit Skype, all is back to normal. Strange thing is, activity window did not show any huge increase in CPU or memory usage. I only see the occasionally red indicating an application is not responding.
I have repaired permissions, ran Onyx, reinstalled 10.5.8 using the combo update, all to no avail. I have to do without Skype. I have no such problems with my iMac or the white Macbook. Any possible solutions?

Answer 1

Hi Allan, thanks for your response. The problem for me right now is that Skype, in its latest version, is unusable for me. My laptop virtually grinds to a halt with the spinning wheel coming up each time I try to do something new. It takes a good few minutes for Skype to start up each time. As I am unable to find a solution, for the moment, I am using the old version, which performs admirably. The size of the file is almost half the latest one, so I do not know what is new in the present one to cause this problem. I repeat that this happened only for my MBA and not for my iMacs or the other more powerful Macbook.