I have noted on a number of occasions that when windows crashes or I reboot from the reboot button and I get the question that as windows didn't shut down properly do I wish to reload normally, and I confirm, the plug in works for a while. The failure has also screwed skype, no voice and messages take forever to send and about 6 hours to receive. This has happened on at least 8 occasions, so perhaps microsoft have done something which is screwing the plugin, and in turn skype, lts own property.