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.