PROFESSOR MARSIAN Ok I have to add: even though i load all the updates for skype since I have it and synched the iphone in the meantime a lot, skype on my iphone still was at 1.0.1. So to get things going I deleted skype in iTunes, downloaded it again and synched the new version to the iphone. And now things are as they should be: skype is working again.
(Version 1.2)