In addition to what Xen and Pete said, can those affected disable their PM popup as well as the stats display.
Also post your anti-virus of choice and try disabling it temporarily or white listing tehforum.co.uk and report back the results.
You hit the nail on the head!
I just uninstalled 0.0.14 and reverted to 0.0.13, same problem.
just on the off chance I checked the add-ons thing and it seems that Skype installed an extension without telling me. Uninstalled that and everything's working again!