i made a much better hack, i wrote a program in VB that just sqeezed the banners out of view using the windows API and a nice control spy to find the proper handles, worked like a charm, i never gave it to anyone at the time except my girlfriend, she was impressed, but then the newer version of AIM came out and id have to modify the prog. that was overa year ago, i guess i could do it again, it would be easier this time having done it once before.