I've been having problems with Skype's portability for over a year now and was sure to find the solution to them here in these forums sooner or later...
But in the meantime I started to wonder if I am the only one having trouble.
It took me a while to notice that after some update (3.0 maybe) I wasn't able to move my Skype folder on my drive, rename it or change the drive letter and afterwards run Skype successfully on the same machine.
I found the solution in the pages of the
Skype forum, but just the line count of the answer that guy got gives you a pretty good picture of how deep Skype is rooted into your system. Also, deleting all those files means a lot of reconfiguring, as, contrary to the info in the thread, all my settings were lost.
I tried to prevent Skype from writing to the registry using Winpooch, but obviously it found other ways to infiltrate me. RegSeeker again showed most of the previously deleted entries.
What really bugs me - after unsuccessfully trying to login I cannot shut Skype down. The tray icon vanishes, but a look at the task manager still shows the Skype.exe process up and running. Windows' own task manager can't kill it, neither can Sysinternal's. It takes a few minutes until that process vanishes.
...not to mention the brutal way Skype tries to penetrate my Firewall.
But the point is - can Skype still be considered portable?