Warning: by default the interface will try to open the skin from the
  vlc share, which is probably an old skin, so the load will fail, and
  afterwards a wxwindows dialog allows to load another skin.
  BUT there seems to be a bug which make the interface crash
  when it tries to load this second skin... workarounds are:
  - deleting the old theme
  - setting the "skin_last2=/path/to/xml/file" in the [Skins] section
  of vlcrc
  - solving the bug ;)