I have been on Skype 5.6 and the intrusiveness is as much or as less as in previous versions. All I need to do is to cut/disable somethings that pop up sometimes. For all its shortcomings, I still find Skype the best and easiest to configure. Plus all the people I talk to are on Skype definitely but some are on yahoo messenger too. That is a bit more time consuming to configure.
Yeah the Skype guys just replaced the unacceptable Home screen by incall advertising which now may look more moderate but is basically the same.
I think if one really wants to be rid of all the annoying popups and home screen, one can go to 5.2 (March 2011) or maybe 5.3 (June 2011). My video calls went through well on those versions too. If I can recall, this annoying stuff started from 5.5.
5.3 is working fine and 100% ad-less for me. Since then Skype is going worse and worse (eg. removed volumecontrol from conversation panel without which I can't live),
Great Dareck I'm using the 3.5.0.202 version which works great on Windows 7 x64, I thought I'm the only one who use an old version...lol
Not on the same day. Skype 5.6.0.105 was released before that. Windows 8 Developer Preview users can't use older versions of Skype.
Why are you people trying to download the old ones while the new one is much better? Is that little ads bothering you?
what bothers me in new skype is that "transfer-progress file window" which they should left it out as a separate window! you cant really see the progress/speed if you type with someone, it scrolls up automatically along with text. Many times the transfer stopped and I didn't even knew! So I stayed with an older version
After killing all the unwanted stuff in skype 5.6, when one is in a video call, apart from the main video screen, there is a little inset screen which remains. It has to be closed everytime. No thanks, I am already back to 5.5 which was bad but not as much as 5.6