Change Yahoo! Messenger Default Status Messages With Your Own Customized Messages Using Resource Hacker

Recently I started using Windows Live Messenger and I always set my own customized status messages in both Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. But I found a very annoying thing in Yahoo! Messenger. It always forgets our customized status messages at every startup and replace it with the default status message “Available“. On the other hand WLM always remembers our customized status messages.

To investigate the issue, I opened my favorite tool Resource Hacker and started checking various DLL and EXE files present in Yahoo! messenger’s “Program Files” folder. After a few minutes, I found the desired strings in “res_msgr.dll” file.

So here is the complete tutorial to change the default status messages in Yahoo! messenger to your own customized text:

1. Open “%programfiles%\Yahoo!\Messenger\res_msgr.dll” file in Resource Hacker.

2. Now go to:

In right-side pane, you can replace the existing status messages with your own desired strings. But remember it’ll only change the menu text, which is displayed when we click on “Messenger -> My Status“.

3. Now the final thing, to change the original status messages, go to:

and in right-side pane, change the status messages with your desired text.

That’s it guys. There are lots of other interesting things in this file, which can also be modified to change various menus/dialog boxes appearance in Yahoo! Messenger.