Skype crashes when starting up

Question

I am running skype 7 on win 8.1 and have used skype for many years. Just started having this problem overnight. Very odd, but on starting up skype it crashes "skype has stopped working". Have tried resetting by deleting the DbTemp folder. No change.
Crash report is:
Faulting application name: Skype.exe, version: 7.0.60.102, time stamp: 0x5489935b
Faulting module name: MFCORE.DLL, version: 12.0.9600.17238, time stamp: 0x53d0bb5f
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x001adccf
Faulting process id: 0x229c
Faulting application start time: 0x01d017815e277f5b
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Skype\Phone\Skype.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\MFCORE.DLL
Report Id: 9dce420e-8374-11e4-bf26-f46d04e4b954
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:
Any help welcome.
Julian

Answer 1

Looks like an issue with Media Foundation on your computer.
Please,  run the DirectX diagnostics tool.
Go to Windows Start and in the Run box type dxdiag.exe and press the OK button. This will start the DirectX diagnostics program. Run this diagnostics and save the results to a file. Please, attach this file to your post.
Be aware that you will have to zip this file before attaching it here.