Goldbots at Hashades/Ishades and Sonars will sometimes auto-invite you to exp share parties. You can just get on a horse, go afk and be a leech off of them for as long as you don't disconnect!

I’ve been using iBot successfully on Windows XP for months, but I had never gotten it to work on Windows 7 x64 until today. Other people seemed to have problems registering the required ocx files in Windows 7, but that was never an issue for me. I didn’t have any of the problems that people seemed to typically report; I simply couldn’t get the bot to run at all.

I would open the bot and click “Run client” and the game would start, but it wouldn’t capture the information from sro_client.exe. It wouldn’t say “Connected to login server” when the game started. I could login successfully through the client, but as soon as I did, I would get disconnected. The bot window would never display any of my character information. It wouldn’t say a thing, not even “Login successful”.

I tried seemingly endless combinations of firewall and antivirus settings, even going so far as to completely turn them both off trying to get this thing to work. Everyone seemed to insist that it does indeed work on Windows 7, so I had no idea why I was having such a ridiculously difficult time getting it up and running. Running it in compatibility mode for Windows XP Service Pack 2 or 3 didn’t work and neither did running the bot as administrator. I really felt I must have been some type of an idiot since, as far as I could tell, no one else was experiencing the same problem I was.

I finally figured it out today, after having given up for some months. The problem was that I had my language for non-Unicode programs set to Japanese, which caused a problem with srodir.ini. I would type in the correct path to either my Silkroad directory or sro_client.exe itself in srodir.ini and it would look correct in Notepad, just like this:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Silkroad

I also tried variations on that, such as adding a trailing backslash or specifying the path to the sro_client.exe itself instead:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Silkroad\

C:\Program Files (x86)\Silkroad\sro_client.exe

So in Notepad it would look just fine to me, the human reader. But it seems that what was getting passed along to iBot was this:

C:¥Program Files (x86)¥Silkroad¥sro_client.exe

Of course, I’m well aware that the backslash displays as the yen symbol in file paths and the like when you’re running a non-Japanese version of Windows in Japanse locale, but I didn’t think it was the problem since I couldn’t actually see anything wrong with the way I was typing in the path. Notepad displayed it correctly, so I thought there was no problem. For the hell of it, I changed the language for non-Unicode programs to English (United States) today and the bot instantly starting working perfectly, just like it does on my XP machine. Turns out the problem had nothing to do with the OS at all; it was just user error. I fail again, it seems.