Can anyone tell me how I can reduce the battery use now that I have a Skype account registered on my N900? (I heard that Skype is a major battery hog). It looks like having "availability" set to "offline" when I am not needing to use Skype will cause the Skype libraries/daemons not to be loaded, is this true or do I need to do something else to disable whatever bits of Skype hog battery and/or data connection?

Yes, if Skype is offline then it won't be communicating with Skype servers all the time, which is what kills your battery and connection.

If switching it via the status menu is annoying, you may wish to investigate mc-tool from the package libmissioncontrol-utils, which with a bit of messing about will let you enable / disable / online / offline the account from the commandline. You can then interface that to shortcuts or whatever you desire...

thanks for the advice, switching via the status menu is fine
Just wanted to make sure that switching into "offline" mode will make it not drain the battery and data connection.