What would be the best way to go about removing the advert at the bottom of msn messenger? I've never tried to remove adverts before so I got no idea where to start, can anyone point me in the right direction.

Hi

I have no idea about MSN Messenger specifically, and I sure as hell wouldn't want that on my system anyway, but there may be a couple of ways of going about it. The ad window is just that, a window likely created with CreateWindowExA which you don't want showing, so you need to find where in the code it is created and find the best way to kill the beast.

If it's an either/or situation where the ads don't show if you've registered or whatever, you may be able to find a simple jump which will bypass it, but if you can't find that jump or there is no option for it then you've got to manipulate the window creation code itself. Rather than just trying to nop out bits and pieces of code, which probably won't work anyway because there may be much code which is actually dependant on the hWnd returned from the CreateWindowExA call, you can play with the various APIs used in creating the window, including ShowWindow and SetWindowPos, to make the ad banner effectively "disappear".

I wrote a little tut about this technique a while back which may be of some help that can probably be used in several different situations to manipulate the appearance of windows/controls in general. The specific steps I outlined using some adware puzzle target also happens to work effectively with the Opera ad banner for example, so the target itself is fairly irrelevant.

You can probably kill the 'communications link' between the software and the banners, i.e. advert.dll or whatever is used, but then you're still left with a big ugly empty window. So it's nice to be able to zap the whole ad window itself. Take a look and see if this helps.

http://www.woodmann.net/fravia/kayaker_adware.htm

Cheers,
Kayaker

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Hoof

What I think is most interesting about advertisement removal is that if you want to do a perfect job they require much work. Chances are those advertisements are downloaded too. Now even if the window was not created you still if you want to not waste bandwidth stop the banners from being downloaded, the window from being repainted, etc all the things made useless at that point. That would be the most efficient way to crack it. Of course it is probably not an easy task but it is doable.

Snatch

Yep, definitely best to get rid of all the CPU sucking code that's going on in the background as well. You can usually cut out its voice by deleting/modifying the dlls it uses to connect to the net. Search for Lavasoft or Optout or Spyware for some info on the types of adware out there and ways to deal with it. This is of course the 1st step. I have no idea what MSN Messenger uses. I think I had seen one technique to modify winsock itself.

Then you can hide its face by getting rid of the ad banner for example as I did. But even then there may be background stuff going on that's no longer needed. I went back and checked the target I had worked on, which alternated between showing a couple of gifs in the ad banner window. If allowed to run it would download more ads from the net and show these as well. Sure enough there was a SetTimer call which set the interval between showing the ads, and the 3rd parameter, the time-out value, was the one you could change to speed up or slow down the displays showing. So you could stop the monsters heart from beating by increasing this value to something ridiculously long, effectively killing any drain on your system.

Did I mention how much I love adware?

Kayaker