Pilkis is right – this works excellent and is less work than you think. I just installed latest build 1269 and got rid of the advertisements AND the white spaces left by them, as well as the worthless welcome screen.

Here a complete and hopefully most simple step-by-step guide:

*) First, shut down ICQ Lite if it’s running
*) Click “Start”/”Run…” and key in “regedit”
*) Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMirabilisICQICQLite and change the values of LiteBannersActive, LiteCLBannerActive and LiteInterOpActive to “0”.
*) Now right-click on key “ICQLite” (in the left pane) and select “Permissions”
*) In the permissions window, click the “Advanced” button
*) Now, deselect the first checkbox which says something about inherited permissions and click “Remove” in the appearing dialog, which will remove all entries in the list, then click the “Apply” button. Why? This will remove all permissions set on this key and disable inheritance. We have successfully blocked ALL access to this key and it’s values.
*) Now we have to re-enable value reading so ICQ can find out what we think of its advertisments. Click “Add”, key in “Everyone” and click “OK”. Now just select the “Grant” of the second entry (“read values”) in the list and click “OK”. Close the other permission windows with “OK”. Note that we gave Everyone access to this key, for simplicity reasons – this will be no big security issue 😉

Now you can test this by simply trying to change the value of one of the entries to anything else with regedit – you should receive an error which says the new value could not be written.

*) Additionally, you can get rid of the welcome screen by opening HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMirabilisICQNewOwnersICQLite and changing ShowWelcomeScreen to “0” – ICQLite should not be running or it will re-enable this value!

FIN. Start and enjoy your new ICQ 🙂

Bye,
Benjamin