Some
time around March 10
2001,
ICQ - the world's most
widely used instant messaging
service - turned on
ads in all its newer
clients. This prompted intense
discussions on how to turn them off. There are several
banners, and several
possibilities:
The
SMS banner can be removed by going into the Icq/partners dir and
replacing partner.xml with a 0 byte file.
The
message window ads can be
removed by renaming or removing the icqateima32.dll, icqateres.dll and icqateimg32.dll files. This will still
leave the ad frame, displaying "ICQ ATE browser 1.0".
In order to
remove the entire ad
frame, the ICQCore.dll needs to be
replaced by an older or
hacked version.
If you wish to
edit it, use a
resource editor (I used
Restorator, http://www.bome.com/Restorator/index.html) and load ICQCore.dll. Select Dialog resource 2566 and set the
window height to 70 like this "2566 DIALOGEX 0, 0, 314, 70, 0".
Save the file.
All these
fixes are known to be valid for
ICQ 2000b
build #3279 and cannot be
guaranteed to work with other
versions.