It occurred to me that there might be those out there who would appreciate step-by-step instructions on setting one's Buddy Icon, but I never actually got around to posting anything. My apologies to all of you for taking so long to post the gritty details.

To set a pic to your buddy icon, do as follows:

1) Right-click on the icon of your choice, and select "Save Picture As..." (This might look different on different browsers, but it'll be something like that).

2) Leaving the filename and file type alone, pick an easy-to-remember folder to save the picture in.

3) Now, open up AIM, if it's not already. On the Buddy List itself, click the "My AIM" menu (leftmost), then "Edit Options" and then "Edit Preferences."

4) Select the "Buddy Icon" tab from the preferences menu, and click "Browse PC."

5) Browse back to the folder where you saved the pic in step (2), and either double-click the file, or single click the file and then click "Select."

And that should do it! Theoretically you should be able to use pretty much any picture (.BMP, .GIF, .JPG) file that's less than ~7KB, but ones that haven't been formatted specifically for use as a Buddy Icon may give you odd results due to scaling.

(09/30/01) - With the addition of JavaScript, the 'double-click' to set option should very shortly be available on all of the icon pages. The longer method above is necessary for anyone w/o JavaScript support, w/o Internet Explorer, and possibly (this will be tested sometime soon) w/o a PC (those with Macs). Please email me and let me know what works and what doesn't... that'll help me figure out what I might need to tweak in the future.