Standard Protection:Prevent IRC communication

"The setting for this in VSE is found at: VirusScan Console -> Access Protection Properties -> AntiVirus Standard Protection -> Prevent IRC Communication. Since your using a work computer your sysadmin probably has this set on the McAfee ePO server and will revert if you change it. This is a default McAfee ePO policy setting.

I don't think anything evil is going on here. Skype.exe tried to use a port that is blocked by McAfee VSE by default. If you have the setting changed then VSE will still probably report the port access attempt to the same log file, but will say: Would be blocked by Access Protection rule (rule is currently not enforced)

My guess is that Skype.exe probably just tried another port?"

McAfee blocks the standard IRC ports by default to help protect from malware that communicates through IRC. It doesn't look like Skype is being malicious. It is likely that the IPs that are tyring to be connected to are either some user in your contact list or a Skype super-node that your machine is trying to connect through on port 666x. You could easily add skype.exe to the Allowed list through the McAfee console and see if that changes performance for you, however, since you say that skype doesn't seem to be affected, you can probably do okay without white-listing it.