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Most versions of Skype use SQLite for local storage, if that is of any help!

I didn't know that; I'll take a look. This was the Linux version 2.x era, mostly.

I've made a converter for 2.x series, reach me at turrini at gmail

whats the best front end program to read those databases, for non-db folks? (windows or linux / CLI or GUI)

There's a reasonably full featured plugin for Firefox called SQLite Manager that lets you open arbitrary SQLite files and browse / edit the contents.

SQLite Studio works great

Yup, I can second that, stable with good feature set.