The actual release from Pure Hacking is here:

http://www.purehacking.com/blogs/gordon-maddern/skype-0day-v...

No mention of root; only remote shell. I have a feeling this is just bad reporting on the part of The Register.

Having said that, I wouldn't give a random person off the street access to my local user account, even if they can't execute as root. Plenty of attackers would be content to rsync all your files to their server for further examination/exploitation.

Frankly, getting a shell as my regular user on my machine can be just about as devastating as getting root. Everything that's important to me is owned by my user.

On my Mac Skype runs under the uid of my normal account, so I'm not sure how this could be used to get root access unless there's a separate privilege escalation exploit involved.

Does any part of Skype run as root? It really shouldn't but I wouldn't put it past that piece of turd.