I do not know how many of you have discovered this, but Skype doesn't
maintain central contacts database. Your contacts are stored on your local
machine at x:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Application Data\Skype
This has 2 implications -
1) Each time you sign in to Skype from a new machine,
or format/reinstall OS on your own machine you need to
keep saving that folder and copying it back in to the right place to
having the contacts or else add all of them one by one again!
( This is like ICQ before ICQ2001 came out.)
Something you can still live with.....
but....

2) Search is also P2P.
When you search for a particular user - Skype scans the contact list
of the users online in your contact list and so on .. recursively.
This means that the person you are searching for, he should be lucky
enough to be in the list of someone online, and someone whom you can
reach in the DFS manner.
You can try this - searching for different usernames gives you different results
at different times of the day.
The other day, I was trying to add a person to my friend's contact list.
The person we were searching for is very much a Skype user, but he unfortunately
existed only on my contact list and I was offline. AS expected, we were not able to
add this person to my friend's contact list and Skype simply cudn't find the person!
We asked all the contacts on my friends contact list to search for that particular
person but no one was successful!
Next morning, I went online on my Skype and asked my friend to search for the same
person, now, again as expected, the search found the person.
Ok. I know P2P is helps in minimizing load on a central server and helps
in scalability - but the least a company can do is provide a central contacts
database - everyone knows how important it is to have one....
Plaxo plugin for Skype?
What sayest thou ?
I'll leave you with that......
cheers!
SB