no Anne that doesnt sound normal is the firewall blocking skype by chance? you may need to add it to the exceptions list, you can look up this screen name I also have skype, and we have realitives we have cam meetings too its nice to see my bro or cousin or his triplets its kind of cool, it did take twink and I a few weeks to figure out how to add a friend lol but it is neat

might have a .dll file that is duplicated in your DSL file.

This happened to us, when we got DSL. Luckily we got a
error message that we looked up on the net and then found out how to fix it. You rename the old file so the computer does not crash. The DSL .dll was duplicating our Windows registry.

Also our DSL loaded a program into the bottom tray, that is always active. There might be a conflict with that. (I disabled it since it is only used for troubleshooting, when we had our
problems with the net last Dec. That problem turned out to be a faulty router by NetGear which we replaced.). The DSL program allows for them to watch you...remotely.

There are just so many things that can go wrong.
I'd type into Google... Skype troubleshooting, or Skype conflicts etc and see what others are talking about.

I set it up once but never did use it, then removed it, so I'm not much help on this one.