Gold Smiley Set giving me a hard time. [ScreenCap]

[Recon1025]

Hello folks,

I've been having a problem with AIM lately regarding the Smileys. You know when you click on the smiley button and then you're displayed with the smileys that you have. Well I think after I installed and immediately uninstalled DeadAim (because I disliked it) a new smiley set was added and it had the name Gold it also had a check-mark next to it. However, I can't change it by any means. I've tried several ways of going around to achieve that, using tools from www.sysinternals.com such as File Monitor & Registry Monitor (which are great freeware tools that you can find there along with suites of System Administration tools). Google doesnt result in much help on the topic and I'm not bad with my queries. What's the problem here? I tried uninstalling and reinstalling AIM and that didnt help. Even removing the cached data from the "Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Temp" folder that aim uses and the AIM folder all together. Registry monitor should be able to show what keys this "Gold smiley set" is using in the registry. That seems the only logical explanation to me. I noticed the smiley set is kept in an .arf file that's located in "Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Temp" named AIM3A.tmp.arf, the arf filetype is simply the way aol regards its archives so renaming the file to .zip format allows you to access its contents which is a set of GIF images & 1 xml file. By the way, File Monitor from sysinternals was used to find out which file is being called out by the smilies.

ScreenCap of Problem:
=================


Snapshot of XML Document:
=====================

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
- <DOCUMENT>
- <RESSET TYPE="SMILEYSET" ID="gold">
  <NAME LANG="EN" TEXT="Gold" />

I thank you for reading this lengthy post. Hopefully you can help me out but it looks tough. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Sincerly,
Recon1025

[rug1000]

my initial suggestion without taking a deeper look into the issue (and I understand your situation completely) is to reinstall deadaim, disable the deadaim smilely set, then uninstall deadaim once again. Although this won't get rid of the smilies all together, it will revert back to the default standard smilies. My assumption is that deadaim sets a subtle flag that is hard to find and isn't intended to be used in AIM, but because the AOL version of the instant messenger uses some of the same dynamically linked files as AIM, setting the flag in the file, registry, or memory will enable that functionality in AIM. I'll look a little deeper into the issue tomorrow. But until then, I hope this solves your problem.

-Rug

[Recon1025]

Thank you rug1000, that worked just fine. I think if I was to remove the DeadAim.ocm from my AIM folder that wouldve fixed the problem as well. Can't believe it was that easy to solve.

[tomec420]

can anyone explain why when you install deadaim and add a smiley set such as the gold or whatever that when you sign on with aim on another computer which doesn't have deadaim installed that you still get the option for the additional smiley set?

this means the info must be stored on the aol server somewhere. does anyone know how to do the smiley change without deadaim??

Thanks!

[anem1e]

You can change this in this AIM preferences. Just go to the expressions section of AIM preferences. Choose the "set expressions" option. A window will pop up that has four squares with the title "I'm Currently Using". In the Smileys section, just click on "clear" and it will clear the gold smileys that are currently set. This will revert AIM back to the standard smileys.