Credit to unknown

Everybody is tired of these annoying flash-based ads came from Yahoo! Messenger. If your ADSL router is not responding or your Internet line is down, it would be more than a p.i.t.a for the “This page could not be found” page.

Fortunately, there’s a way to remove these annoyances.

Create a text file and name it whatever you want. I assume it is newtext.txt. Then paste these lines into your file

@ECHO OFF
TITLE Remove ads from Yahoo Messenger 8
> %TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO REGEDIT4
>>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO.
>>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Yahoo\Pager\YUrl]
>>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Messenger Ad"="*"
>>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Webcam Upload Ad"="*"
>>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Webcam Viewer Ad"="*"
>>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Webcam Viewer Ad Big"="*"
>>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Webcam Viewer Ad Medium"="*"
>>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Change Room Banner"="*"
>>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Conf Adurl"="*"
>>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Chat Adurl"="*"
>>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Y Content"="*"
REGEDIT /S %TEMP%.\noYMads.reg
DEL %TEMP%.\noYMads.reg
ATTRIB -R "%PROGRAMFILES%\Yahoo!\Messenger\Cache\urls.xml"
ECHO "" >"%PROGRAMFILES%\Yahoo!\Messenger\Cache\urls.xml" 
ATTRIB +R "%PROGRAMFILES%\Yahoo!\Messenger\Cache\urls.xml"

Quit your Yahoo! Messenger. Rename the file to newbat.bat and double click to make it run. Open your Y!M again and voilà, these ads were gone.

If you installed Yahoo! Messenger on the other folder than the default “Program Files”, replace %PROGRAMFILES% with your new location.

2007/11/01: With the new Yahoo! Messenger 9, you have to do one more step (applied for Windows 2000 and above only)

Go to your Yahoo! Messenger folder, then Messenger\Caches, find the file urls.xml, right click, choose Properties. Open Security tab and then perform a Deny Write for every group or username in the list. Click OK and open Yahoo! Messenger again.