Removing WinRAR Advertisement Popup by Reverse Engineering and Binary Patching
This tutorial explains how to locate and eliminate the persistent WinRAR advertisement window by using Spy++, API Monitor, and IDA to identify the RarReminder class, find the CreateWindow call at offset 0xaa56d, and replace the call instruction with NOP bytes, effectively disabling the popup.
WinRAR is a widely used compression tool, but its frequent advertisement popup can be annoying. This guide shows how to permanently remove that popup using reverse‑engineering techniques.
First, the Windows utility Spy++ is used to inspect WinRAR's windows and identify the ad window's class name RarReminder .
Next, API Monitor is employed to track WinRAR's API calls, especially the CreateWindow series, allowing us to locate the creation record of the RarReminder window.
By examining the call stack in API Monitor, the exact offset of the offending CreateWindow call is found (0xaa56d).
Using the disassembler IDA , the WinRAR.exe binary is opened and the instruction at offset 0xaa56d is inspected. The call instruction that triggers the ad window is replaced with NOP instructions (0x90) on the x86 platform.
After patching, the modified WinRAR.exe is saved. When the program is run again, the advertisement popup no longer appears.
This method can be adapted to remove unwanted popups from other software by following the same steps of window identification, API monitoring, and binary patching.
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