Skype managed to crash almost all of their network with bad profile information, causing the application to hang. The worst part about this has been that when the program 'hung', it was not possible for them to rollout out a self repairing fix.

The following fix for skype has worked.

Fix Skype On Windows

delete all files in C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Roaming\Skype and restart it.

Fix Skype on Mac

delete all files in ~/Library/Application Support/Skype/

Warning this may delete your skype history

The following worked on a computer running windows xp

The user went to run and entered  %appdata%\skype and then deleted the file shared.xml

Maybe copy it first or even rename it?