Yahoo Messenger is a free program which connects you to the massive Yahoo service. It tells you when your friends are online so you can chat. It can also retrieve the latest news, sports scores, weather, and travel fares. You can even search the Yahoo engine directly from the interface. The latest versions of Yahoo Messenger allow the ability to change the interface.

To install a Yahoo Messenger Theme (Skin), first you'll need to have an unzipping utility such as WinZip. Most Yahoo skins are in zip format. Open the zipped files you download, and extract the contents to your Yahoo skins folder. Assuming you used the default installation location, and your main hard drive is C:, you'd tell your unzip program to extract these files to:

c:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\skins\Name of Skin

Be sure to replace "Name of Skin" with the name you'd like this new folder to be. Each of your Yahoo skins should be in their own folders. For this example, we've extracted a Jenny McCarthy skin to:
c:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\skins\jenny.

Open up your Yahoo Messenger program, and go to the Preferences option. This is located under the "File" menu. You can also get to it by hitting CTRL+P. You should see a screen that looks like this:

Go to Appearance, and you'll see a drop down list of skins available on your system, including the one you just installed. Since extracted our Jenny McCarthy theme to a folder called "jenny" above, you'll notice that "jenny" now appears on the list of available themes. Select it, and hit OK to set it and close the Preferences box, or Apply to preview it, or OK to set it.

That's all there is to it. Above is a before and after shot of the Yahoo Messenger program. If you'd like to create your own Yahoo Messenger themes (skins), then take a look at the great tutorial in the Yahoo Messenger help section for step-by-step instructions and template files you can use for buttons, backgrounds and status icons.

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