We can only dream…

you can reshack all that stuff out

im new to it, but theres guides around here somewhere that will help you get rid of that stuff

Or if you want a no-bs AIM program, I suggest TerraIM. http://terraim.sourceforge.net

I haven’t used the newer version (the webpage doesn’t have the latest beta), but off the top of my head it has logging and I think tabbed IMs…if it doesn’t have tabs yet, it will in a future version. This is a stand-alone exe :drool: (if you don’t know me, I absolutely LOVE those) which doesn’t require any installation or extra files, and he intends on keeping its size below 1.4megs so that you can take it with you on a floppy to wherever…school even? 😉

It’s entirely possible to make your buddy list look like that, but it can be pretty hard to explain over the internet, especially if you’re new to reshacking and didn’t know those types of things existed. I could do some things for you myself and send you the edited file, but it’s better to teach a man to fish, right? If you wanted, some day we could get on netmeeting or remote assistance and you could ask me “how do i do this” and then I would do it slowly and you could watch how it’s done and what all is changed. That way, once you’ve learned a little bit, you can start to ponder things like “I wonder if I could do this…” and since you have a basic understanding of reshacking and/or hex editing, it will GREATLY help your familiarity with modifications and you can begin to explore things on your own.

I haven’t had much feedback at all on my modding FAQ even though it’s over a year old (googlebot doesn’t pick it up because of the frames I think :/ ), but people really like my howto.
http://jon8rfc.homeip.net/aim/m_m/modding_faq.html
http://jon8rfc.homeip.net/aim/howto

I wrote the FAQ for the middle_man site, but haven’t had a chance to update all the hex offsets or add that FAQ yet, but I should be able to in the next few months! Read the FAQ completely, more than once if you don’t get it the first time through. I put a solid 2-3 hours trying to decide how to write that FAQ out and revised minor changes numerous times, trying to make it perfect…hopefully it helps you out at least a little!

Man, I would’ve loved a LIVE demonstration of how to do stuff when I was beginning, but that wasn’t easily an option. Luckily, one friend from the AIM+ forums (plasma2002b) was so helpful and helped me get started reshacking AIM doing one of simplest and most common things–changing the logon image. Now I do most of my stuff by experimentation and peeking around, though I’m not as extreme as some out there who change AIM all around. I do little annoyances like you have, and move and disable a few things, change some text in places and whatnot. Since I’ve become so comfortable with hex editing, it’s a lot easier to learn how people crack exe’s and stuff. When you have a foundation to build on, you can look at how one thing is done and figure out another with a little work. Now I can set games to not require the dumb CDs to be in the drive before it starts up……among other things, teehee 😉

EDIT: actually, I just took a long peek at it and updated the “so I can hex count…now what” FAQ a little bit to further clarify what is going on. Hopefully that helps out.