I use Yahoo Messenger because it was the first PC-phone service that would accept my credit card. It’s not working though, it crashes reliably 5-10 seconds into starting up — exactly when the flash-ad starts to repeat.

And when it crashes it blames flash8.ocx. That really sounds like the flash ad.

Blocking the ads is hard; the registry edits I was able to find wouldn’t block them. But a patch called “YM.v8.x-Ad.Remover-YMulti.rar” which got rid of the ads (yay!) and broke the PC-phone functionality (which is understandable, I doubt Yahoo tests to see what happens if arbitrary code attacks their binaries).

Fortuneatly un-install, re-install changed the ad it displayed, so it worked. So I could make my phone call AND be advertised to, I’m so glad that there are ads in software/services I’m paying to use (only $10 so far, but if any advertiser paid even a nickel to annoy me, they overpaid).

p.s. I’m aware that the company refers to itself as Yahoo! not Yahoo, but I’m not sure I’m ready to accept punctuation inside of words yet.