Source of emoticons in Office Communicator 2007

Question

Let's say I really like some of the emoticons that Office Communicator 2007 has (like I dunno, the (woi) icon with the building blocks) and I want to obtain the .gif or whatever kind of image file it is so I can add it as a custom emot on other IM programs.

I used a tool that'd extract icons from DLLs and EXEs and ran it on C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Communicator and all subfolders. Came up with a lot of icons but zero emoticons. Same results with Microsoft Office.

Does anyone know where Office Communicator's emoticons are kept, so I can extract them?

Solution

I think you'll find that you're not allowed to do that as they're owned by Microsoft and the license agreement will not allow you to disassemble their software.

That said, assuming that they're not stored in a non-standard/secret/obfuscated format, I'd guess that they're just stored as GIF or PNG image resources in the executable and that tools such as PE Explorer will allow you to look at the innards of the app and at least see the emoticons.