AIM Ad Hack
AIM, which is short for AOL Instant Messenger, is one of the popular Instant Messengers with more than 53 million active users. Only Jabber comes close to this numbers while other popular clients such as MSN have only half of that active user base. One big problem with AIM is the integration of advertisements and bundled software which is not needed to run AIM at all. These can at times become annoying, which is why some users seek to find ways to remove those annoyances from AOL's instant messenger.
AIM Ad Hack is a free software that interacts with AIM during installation making it possible to remove unneeded or obtrusive features and advertisements from AIM while keeping all the necessary features in place. It removes for instance the advertisements from the main window and the buddy list, blocks and removes AOL Toolbar and Loader and disables the AOL Host Manager from starting up with Windows.
Each option can be checked or unchecked before installation. It is furthermore possible to install several widely known plugins for AIM during installation, to name some: Facebook, Buddy Icon Maker and Text Colors plugins.
You only need to download AIM Ad Hack which downloads AIM during the installation. You can uncheck that as well but this is only advisable if you already have the latest version of AIM installed and want to remove features and tools only. Make sure you download the right version of AIM Ad Hack though because there are several available for download at the developers website.
Update: The official website is not accessible anymore. It is not clear if it will come back at a later point in time, or if the AIM Ad Hack project has been discontinued. Software download portals such as Softpedia host the latest version of the software on their servers. The version will eventually stop working when AOL updates their instant messenger to a new version.
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Like z0iid I too recommend pidgin (formerly gaim) http://pidgin.im/
It doesn’t include any ads that need to be hacked out and it supports multiple protcols (MSN, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo!, Jabber and probably more, but they’re the ones I use).
I’ve been using AIM Ad Hack for at least 3 years without any problems. The only grudge I have is against AOL for constantly fixing things in AIM that don’t need to be fixed.
deadaim is good…. pidgin is better.
Another idea you might to touch on is http://oldversion.com . They have all the old versions of aim as well as all kinds of other free and open source software.