Microphone not working in Skype

[Artim]

Grrrrrrr, PulseAudio.  It was in Beta when it was first imposed on Ubuntu-derived distros.  I used to just remove it and replace it with ALSA, but it's more complicated now, so many applications have PulseAudio as a dependency.  Killing it (but leaving it's dead body in place, so to speak, by not uninstalling it) usually still works for fixing some applications that depend on it.