Ever had someone IM you and a weird side bar comes up? Welp, I didn’t used to care about it since only 3 or 4 people I knew used it and I didn’t chat with them often. Since I’ve been home, I’ve been working on fixing my computer (story to come later). So I’ve been using my laptop in the meantime. I have AIM Pro installed on my laptop since I didn’t like the new AIM Triton client they had available at that time when I installed.
Due to ununusal circumstances where rdpclip.exe wasn’t behaving correctly and using 99% of my cpu power and the clipboard sharing busted, I’ve been using AIM to send text between my laptop and my machine back home and whenever I IM myself, I got this ugly sidebar on my AIM 5.5 client.
Anyway, Cari tells me the same thing so I try to see if there’s a way to disable this theme or “expression” as AIM calls it. I wasn’t able to find out how to disable it from my side, but apparently AIM has an option to disable displaying expressions/themes from other people.
Once you enter the Preferences dialog (F3), goto ‘AIM Expressions’ on the left and look for the area marked “Incoming Expressions”. By default this is ‘unchecked’, but that doesn’t mean that setting reflects what is saved. I had to actually check that box, save that setting by clicking Apply, and uncheck that box and save the settings again before the AIM sidebar thingy disappeared.
I wonder if they fixed this in the later clients.
thanks, i had the same annoying sidebar on my instant message windows. and i finally got pissed enough to google it to find a real solution since aim said it was already disabled.
this page was the first result and worked!
Thank you!! Who would’ve thought that something so simple would’ve fixed this. Those things were the bane of my existence and I tried searching through every option to get rid of those damn things. Thank you again!
Ok. I know I can disable hearing another’s sounds during IM sessions. But, when I use my AIM and send an IM to others, they hear a laugh as a default sound when my message appears to them. How do I disable, or at least change the sound my IM’s are sending. They say it sounds like an evil laugh. Not exactly a good thing for meeting other women!
Have you tried disabling your buddy icon to see if that work? I’ve seen people replace the buddy icons with audio files before.
I know this is a really old entry, but I just reinstalled AIM on a new computer and the expressions were driving me mad. I never would have guessed that I’d have to enable that and THEN disable it.
Thanks a lot!