I can successfully make calls and it is refreshing to notice that whatever the nasty issue(where only root can make calls and inability to change the default sound device) was with 1.3.0.53 is no more. As pre 1.4 alpha, the last version to work successfully on my system was 1.2.0.18, and according to these forums many users where not able to use 1.3.0.53

The User Interface is clean but unintuitive(looks like it lacks features) although it is easy to click around and figure out what to do.

I will edit the bug section below whenever I find a bug that I believe we have not been warned about.

[Bugs]
1. Clicking on a contact, then doing anything else(eg. hitting a key stroke or clicking elsewhere in the white contacts frame) but call the contact crashes the program with

You can use our publicly accessible bug tracker to submit bugs. This makes it a lot easier to track their repairments progress for both you and us.

I have no such issues in 1.3x in Gentoo. I never ever run skype as root and I do not use the default sound device with skype. I only use 1.4 now though but I was testing static and shared 1.3 yesterday because of some things I very much dislike in gentoo's script that loads Skype.

Interesting I may not understand your 1.4 issue as I can't seem to reproduce it.
You must click on contact then hit a key or click in the contact expanded area and then call them and you get that crash? I'm trying to figure out how to make it happen on my Gentoo system. Are you using static or shared? At the moment I am using shared. What version of qt? If I can reproduce it we can get more ammo to get it fixed I hope.

The problems with 1.3x were not specific to any distribution, it seemed to affect a bunch of users across many distributions. I spent a few days every month trying to get it to work on my system with out any success.

I have tried the static build and the bug is gone. I am thinking it may be a bug with QT 4.2.3. I was using 4.2.2 but had compiled it without the "accessibility" USE flag and non of the 1.4 alpha builds would work. When I went to portage, 4.2.3 was available, compiled it with the correct flags, tried the generic build first, it worked and to my error did not bother with the static build.
I have a couple of programs that use the qabstractitemview object. I will try recompiling them with 4.2.3 and hunt for the bug. Otherwise, I am happy with 4.2.3 since the change log shows a correction for a bug that gave me a terrible headache to work around.