Headphones and plugged in mic with SuSe 9.1 and Skype for SuSe9 work
talking to a Windows Skype client (though my mike volume comes out extremely
low on the Windows side).

WIth the statically linked Linux client used with RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 WS
the sound appears chopped about 10 times/second.

Hmmm.

It appears to me, that the statically linked version has QT without threading enabled, thus leading to the choppyness. Re-compiling QT libraries with '-thread' as option to './configure' and using the dynamically linked version did the job.

If I could find the qt libs out on the net I would. I downloaded what I thought was
3.3.2, and ended up building the entire development environment.

From where did you download QT?

Thanks!

Directly from www.trolltech.com

Don't forget the -thread parameter to ./configure - otherwise you'll end up as before. QT does NOT automagically enable multi-threading.

Also, use the dynamically linked Skype then, or otherwise ...