This has been covered quite a bit over on vbulletin.com. Do a search on those forums and you'll see lots of info about this new feature. Here's one:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...ighlight=skype
This new feature uses "SkypeWeb" to poll Skype's server for each users' online status. The problem with this scheme is two-fold. First, the icon they serve is ugly and secondly, their server goes down frequently, which causes our forum pages to stall and lag.
I think this feature was rushed out in 3.5.4. It's been reported as a bug, in fact, and last I read it was fixed for the next public release:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/bugs3...iew&bugid=2317
I had added the SkypeWeb update to my previous install of 3.5.3 (to get a sneak peak.) I hated it. In the meantime, I edited my templates and removed the Skype bits completely. Much too much trouble to worry about all the time.