More or less, every _other_ time I start skype, the tray icon appears in a window, instead of in the area in the panel. If I Ctrl+C skype and start it again, it works fine. Any idea why this happens?

I'm using GNOME 2.4/Fedora Core 1.

Also, the RPMs for 'systems with Qt 3.1', such as FC1 doesn't work because the QT package on fedora is simply 'qt' not 'qt3'. If I install with --nodeps, skype works fine other than the above problem.

I can help you out. Install kdeproxyapplet and the tray icon will apear in your gnome system notification area.

actually its called kdetrayproxy, try google

I installed an RPM for kdetrayproxy, but I still get the same behavior. If I manually launch Skype, I can usually get it to launch "into" the tray in Gnome (I don't really use KDE). Sometimes, however, I have to explicitly switch to another virtual desktop and then launch it to get it into the tray.

No, it's not a show-stopper, but it's a bit irritating. Other apps, like Gaim, launch into the tray just fine.

Unfortunatelly I am not here to give solutions, but to say that the same behavior happens with Gnome 2.8 (FC2). I didn't recall the previous Linux version of Skype doing this.