AV's Blog

Are you missing your custom emoticons when you switch machines or if you format your machine ? At one time I had a nice collection of these emoticons... Stuff that was collected from others. Its just the same old thing, if you like it, you save it ;-) Now obviously since they are not stored on the server, they do not travel with you if you switch machines or are not going to come back if you format your machine.

So here's a simple solution that I bumped into long back. MSN Messenger 7.0 and above (I am currently using 8.0 Beta) store their custom emoticons under the logged in users profile. In that there are separate folders per MSN Account that you use, organized by what I believe is the numeric MSN ID.[C:\Documents and Settings\Your Login Name\Application Data\Microsoft\MSN Messenger\Your Numeric MSN ID\CustomEmoticons] All files here have a .dat extension. These files (except index.dat) can be simply copied to any other folder and renamed to .png extension. Use the MS DOS REN Command to make life easier. Then just add them up into your new MSN UI by going to the My Emoticons window and clicking Create.