Do you get a chat channel appearing and notifying you there is new content called "Mood Messages" in Skype? This has been driving me insane for like 6 months because I'll usually stop what I'm doing to look at new skype messages, since I use it for work. So you disrupt your work flow to look at the new message to find so and so has been idle for 30 minutes. Great.
Every time I've attempted to solve it, I'd get more frustrated as apparently there's no option for it. I would leave conversation, hide conversation, rename it, add it as a contact and delete it... it would seem to go away for a while, and so I'd forget. But like a bad horror movie, IT WOULD ALWAYS COME BACK!
But I finally figured it out. Once again, Mac is to blame. ;)
On Mac only, there is an easy setting to find under Preferences->General to disable mood messages as chat. This is the most common solution you'll find if you go googling for it. Not much help for PC users who are seeing this problem though, right? Because there is no such option you can find anywhere in the PC options menus. Yet it still happened.
So here's what was happening to me: I use Skype on both PC and Mac, but it's only occasionally active on the Mac. Like a naive pre-1990 goose, I assumed that my PC options would control my PC experience. However, when the Mac was on and Skype was running, it had the default setting for mood messages enabled, thus creating a chat channel and faithfully broadcasting all annoying mood updates to it. This would in turn notify the PC client I had a new chat channel, and it would download the mirror of the chat being broadcast on the Mac client. Disabling this option on the Mac client seems to have killed it.
I hope this little nugget of info is useful. If I can reduce just one person's urge to kill, then it was worth it!
