I noted some time ago that most recent software comes bundled with a lot of other stuff. A custom Google toolbar, an automatic update downloader, etc, etc. All occupies hard disk space, and all eats some memory. Now Skype has given a surprise. I already noticed that it installs some plugin manager called SkypePM.exe. Do you have it running and eating some 20 megs of your memory? :-)
And what for? Do you have ANY Skype plugins?? Me neither.
I simple deleted the file after I terminated it with Task Manager. A bit drastic yes, but Skype restarts it all the time. But the great surprise came only after that. I was debugging some network code and was absolutely clueless. I tried some dummy connections from the other machine like telnet to port 80, the standard web server port. As I watched traffic with WireShark, I noticed connection succeeded to that port. What the... I said, and opened a browser and typed my IP from another computer. I checked the sniffer log and, guess what. Bleeding Skype does have a webserver in it. It listens on port 80 and also handled the standard HTTP GET message and responded properly. Of course it did not display any web page, it returned a page not found error. But let's not be fooled by ths, there is a huge difference between a webpage that does not exist, because there is no server on that address, and between a webserver that runs but returns there is no page to display.
Here is a screenshot, see the open port for yourself.
(you can disable your local Skype webserver in the Tools menu Options / Advanced / Connection dialog. I did it.)
