Installed desktask and attempted to have a video conference on skype, the video was horribly choppy, slow, the cpu was maxing out. Disconnected, exited desktask, reconnected.. skype works well again. Retried it several times.. always a problem when desktask is running.

I'm not saying that you don't have a problem, however I'm using DeskTask and have no problems video-conferencing with Skype on a 2.66GHz P4 / 1GB RAM system. Did you check what DeskTask's CPU utilization was at the time? Was there an occurrence of Outlook running and if so, what was its CPU utilization? It may help if you state your system configuration.