Transfer Emoticons to another machine

It was a pain to realized my fav emoticons may be lost and I will not able to use my cute picture during msn. My situation came about when my previous notebook hard disk crashed. Luckily, I was able to salvage essential files out, including my emoticons.

The next step was to find a way to copy them back into the msn in my new notebook. After some googling, I found that the emoticons files are stored in the following directory

WinXP:
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\\ObjectStore\CustomEmoticons

Thou, the directory above is not exactly the same in Vista (my new notebook)

Vista:
C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Messenger\\ObjectStore\CustomeEmoticons

And I have to turn on "Show Hidden Folders and Files" folder option to find AppData directory.

A simple copy of the directoy to new notebook and restarting my MSN did not work to show my emoticons. The alias key works but a blank emoticon is shown. It seem that MSN protects the emoticons by encrypting them. So a simple copy will not work.

Again, thanks to google, there is a tool to backup and restore all msn files. MSNBackup is a free tool that works for MSN 8.1 and MSN Live Messenger.

So here the steps I look to transfer and install back my emoticons into my new notebook.

Rename my current Vista CustomEmoticons to temp name.
Copy the previous CustomEmoticons to the Vista location.
Started MSNBackup.
Enter my hotmail ID and passport ID. (Passport ID is found at the bottom of this page.
https://account.live.com/EditProf.aspx?mkt=en-us&rp=Profiles. )
Start the backup.
Rename back the Vista CustomEmoticons to its original name.
Start the restore.
Voila! Emoticons transfer ed from one previous msn to my new msn.

=)