0x80040154 is
REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG
(class not registered). That means that the Skype DLL is not registered on your system (or even not present).
A quick web reserach shows that you are not the first with this error message:
Visual Basic and Skype4Com problem[
^].
There the problem was solved by creating a 32-bit application instead of a 64-bit one.