It says to me that Skype is really a 32 bit program, depending on 32 bit packages, as oldcpu pointed out earlier. 
Had installed skype-4.2.0.13-suse.i586 meant for opensuse 12.1 in my opensus13.1 64 bit HP system as described at the start of this post. Messaging worked but sound did not. Then installed alsa-plugins-pulse-32bit using yast as recommended above and sound and video now works.
I had previously done the following recommended on the Skype site for 64 bit systems: **su -c ‘zypper install xorg-x11-libXv-32bit libqt4-32bit libqt4-x11-32bit libpng12-0-32bit libQtWebKit4-32bit’ **I do not know if that made any difference, but sound and video did not work until the alsa-plugin was installed. Thanks for the help.lol!