"Send me a message via Skype"
 

How would I explain this... Oh, yeah. This is what I'm seeing on my monitor.

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b3...2448/skype.jpg

Now my question is, shouldn't there be some sort of Skype icon similar to Yahoo and AIM?

Yes there should.

It's interactive as far as I know.
That may be part of the problem.

By interactive Cats means the image is dynamic. The precise image shown depends on the "state" of the person to which it relates.

The issue is basically that the images are not hosted locally on our server because we do not have access the users online status. In order to get a suitable image the image is fetched directly from Skype's server by your browser. The Skype server is occasionally slightly slower in responding to requests for a status bound image (I assume because it tries to work out the status each time). If it is so slow in doing so, that the request for the image times out, a sensible browser will show the "text alternative" (which is what you are seeing). In IE that would probably appear as a little red X with the text in a sunken box. In other words it is basically treated as a missing image.

The only thing we can do is replace the dynamic image with a static one hosted on our servers. This is a forum option but we've not even thought about changing it from the default because so few people use it and the time out happens so infrequently it isn't worth the effort required to actually find and test the setting.

Sometimes I'm in locations so fubared up that ALL my little icons on AnimeSuki read as textual alternatives because the browser just says to hell with waiting anymore.

That's better in my mind that waiting for pointless imagery --- I keep hammering my bank for a low-bandwidth alternative because they've gone freaking nuts with buttons and images that come from multiple servers -- the actual data I want is maybe 5% of the page's "weight". :)