As a side note, I'm running the most recent version of Adium (1.4b8), Skype (2.8.0.659), and the plugin (24 July)

I seem to be having the same problem as Philip0190 and thegeekinside:

I start Adium, and even if Skype is already running I get an error "could not connect to skype process. skype not running?" Adium is completely unresponsive while it goes through this process.

Any help (or a previous version!) would be great.