For the last few months Skype has been crashing every time I tried to start it on my MacBook Pro. There were error messages in the crash log like this
Thread 0 Crashed: 0 <<00000000>> 0xffff07d7 __memcpy + 55 (cpu_capabilities.h:228) 1 ...ickTimeComponents.component 0x991fa700 _SGVideoGetChannelDeviceList + 2069 2 ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore 0x90cd0a53 CallComponentFunctionCommon + 513 3 ...ickTimeComponents.component 0x991edb29 _SGVideoComponentDispatch + 123 4 ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore 0x90cd0738 CallComponentDispatch + 34
Which led me to think it was something to do with Quicktime and/or video. So it occurred to me that starting iChat and opening the video preview before starting skype might help. It does!