Removing the AIM Greetings Button

So many of us are almost driven to madness because we tend to click the Ecards / Greetings button on AIM quite frequently, and causing an annoying webpage to open. Some of us do it more than others accidentally, and some of us don't even notice the pest. Well, fortunately, you can change what it does. Although you won't be able to completely remove the button in this tutorial, you can make it go to a different URL such as your favorite webpage (but it would still be pointless) or you can make it do NOTHING! I'm pretty sure you want the latter, but the former will still be possible.

Note: This was tested on AIM version 5.5.3595 and your results on other versions may vary.

Requirements

• Windows AIM version with the greetings button (between the direct connection and emoticon buttons on the IM window)

Tutorial

First, you will need some software, and more specifically, a PE executable resource editing software. Here we recommend ResHacker (Resource Hacker). It's free and can be very useful. We'll be using ResHacker for this tutorial.

With ResHacker, go to File > Open and open the AimRes.dll file. Expand String Table and navigate to 113. In 113, select 1033.

You should see something similar to the following.

STRINGTABLE
LANGUAGE LANG_ENGLISH, SUBLANG_ENGLISH_US
{
1794, "Send Buddy List Information"
1795, "Comment:\t%s\n"
1796, "Sto&re/Edit Buddy Comment"
1797, "\t"
1799, "S&end IM Greeting"
1800, "http://aim.aol.com/greetings/greetings.adp?FromSN=%s&ToSN="
1801, "http://aim.aol.com/greetings/greetings.adp?FromSN=%s&ToSN=%s"
1802, "Send IM Greeting"
1805, "http://aim-devs01.aol.com/topicalchat/topicalchat.adp?topic="
1806, "Could not join chat room '%s'.\nPlease try again later."
1807, "Dele&te"
}

The key is to change the lines starting with 1800 and 1801. To make it do entirely nothing, change their values to just aim: (with the colon). You can also change it to any URL instead if you decide so, even another aim style link. It should turn out something like the following.

STRINGTABLE
LANGUAGE LANG_ENGLISH, SUBLANG_ENGLISH_US
{
1794, "Send Buddy List Information"
1795, "Comment:\t%s\n"
1796, "Sto&re/Edit Buddy Comment"
1797, "\t"
1799, "S&end IM Greeting"
1800, "aim:"
1801, "aim:"
1802, "Send IM Greeting"
1805, "http://aim-devs01.aol.com/topicalchat/topicalchat.adp?topic="
1806, "Could not join chat room '%s'.\nPlease try again later."
1807, "Dele&te"
}

After editing, press Compile Script. Close AIM if it's open, and go to File > Save. Restart AIM! It should now do your bidding

Don't worry if you've made a mistake and saved it. Beside the fact you can change it back, Resource Hacker also created an AimRes_original.dll backup file automatically.

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