It often happens that whenever I initiate a video call with Skype it won't work. This isn't be a big issue, but it also throws Skype in some state where you can't make Skype audio/video calls, or even send Skype IMs. The only solution is to reboot the phone, which is not nice.

So I was wondering if anyone experienced this issue, and if you know a more elegant way to solve it. I was thinking of a desktop shortcut that would kill and restart Skype, but I am not very familiar with the N900 to know what process must be killed, where it is restarted, and how to add a desktop shortcut to a bash script. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

The processes to kill are "skyhost". They are at least restarted when you change our availability, probably even without doing anything special but I am not sure about that.

Thanks!
I will try it next time Skype hangs.

Just come back from a trip abroad, and been video calling my wife back home. Had endless troubles with skype (quality issues, not crashes) and ended up using google chat video. Much more reliable I found. I think part of the problem was that Skype seemed to need twice as much bandwidth as Google so this was killing my 3G connection (and my roaming data charges).

Delete your skype account and setup again could solve the issue.