Duck and Cover

I think most people here have broke the law, it's explicitly written in the licence:

You may not decompile, reverse engineer, or disassemble the oftware, except as permitted by law.

Even undating files could be considered as illegal (exept if you have interplay's authorisation... )

Actually you missed the "except where permitted by law".

This clause is there because it is indeed legal to decompile, disassemble and reverse engineer anything you want for educational purposes (obveously they won't be yelling on rooftops that you can do it in their own license now will they?)

And I highly doubt anyone here is doing it for profit which slants it to educational purposes.

Now even though most patches (ie Fallout patches, and most game "cheats") are for educational purposes, it's not legitimate to redistrubute someone's modified work, even while crediting fully the original author and taking all responsibility of screwups upon yourself.

Donc tu est Français?

So distributing mods is illegal? They contains modified files from the game. (according to me it should be using the game license to make money that should be illegal... FOBOS)

Effectivement je suis français... tu sembles être canadien toi

That's correct, even ditributing the ORIGINAL file is usually a brach of the license agreement and thus illegal - unless you provide it in it's original contents...

For example, say you wanted to make sure the end-user has the latest Fallout2.exe, you should include Fallout2.zip, and manually unzip it with a program (and possibly even run the damn installation, though you can "press enter" and hide everything from the user... You know InstallShield provides a way to make silent installs like that - and of course there's a way to do that even with programs which didn't come with such a feature).

Then say you wanted to patch this exe, it's legit to make a patch the modifies it (or even use a loader as you did), but you shouldn't include the modified file...

I've actually had to deal with such issues professionally - though I only did the programming part, not the legal part, so there might be some things which I'm still missing.

Who cares about that old russian mod for party memebers: 1) wasn't released and b) broke the exe... For all we know he might hve send people touched up pictures... I like to SEE things to beleive them.

It was done by Heinz from Team-X during his FO exe studying and it not broke exe (he added new script command for this in exe free space).
It was done 1,5 years ago, when we all dont know anything about FO scripts. I have no reasons not to believe Heinz, but... it's your right believe me or not.
Now it really dont have much sense. I posted this only to show that many interesting things can be done through exe modification.